Detailed review by koshkha
koshkha
Northampton, United Kingdom98%
Zen is one of my favourite restaurants even though I can generally only eat there once or twice every year or two. 'So how come I don't go more often?', you may be thinking. That's simple, Zen is in New Delhi and I'm not. But if I were, I'd be there so often they'd have to give me a discount for my loyalty. It really is an outstanding Chinese restaurant and - controversial as this might sound - for me, nobody does Chinese food better than Indians.
Yes, I said that was controversial and I know there will be a few raised eyebrows. I've been to China a lot and eaten in many top restaurants - even one where they proudly told me that President Clinton had loved their chicken feet but the problem with Chinese food in China is their total lack of understanding of those weird foreigners like myself who choose not to eat meat. I do eat fish and seafood but I tend to keep quiet about that for fear of what they might do to it so in China I go completely meat-free. I've been in places where the chef clearly thought that spicy tofu would be so much better if he bunged a load of minced pork in to liven things up. And picking out mince with chopsticks isn't my idea of fun. And so for me, eating Chinese food in a country with a higher appreciation for the vagaries of consumer food choices suits me much better - hence my love of Indian Chinese food.
Zen's been on my must-see-must-eat-at list since I first started going to India and it's always a joy to go back. It's not hard to find as it's located in Block B of New Delhi's Connaught Place. If you are arriving by Metro, just check the exit signs to make sure you get the right block. If you are coming by car or taxi, the drivers won't have trouble finding it and if you have a driver booked for the evening, there's plenty of parking nearby. Connaught Place is New Delhi's Knightsbridge - it's where many of the top shops and restaurants can be found rubbing shoulders with street traders, tucked under the colonnaded blocks of shops. Zen is recognisable by its distinctive etched glass windows with art nouveau patterns and the heavy front door with its liveried doorman.
Once inside the art nouveau design continues on the walls and the tables are squeezed quite closely together. This is a popular restaurant and they do cram the punters in fairly tightly by local standards. The ground floor is non-smoking and the mezzanine is the only place where smokers can sit. It took us a while to work this out after the table next to us had three different couples each spending a short time having a drink before moving on to the smoking zone. We really did wonder if they just didn't want to sit with us until we realised they were all smokers.
On our last visit we'd just come into Delhi from Amritsar where the culinary choices were very limited and where two of us had eaten out for little more than £2-3 per meal between us. Prior to that we'd been staying in a small village in the Punjab where our friends' dad had a cook who must have ranked amongst the worst in the country. So we were ready to have a bit of a blow-out meal.
The waiters bought us menus and took our orders for drinks. Since Amritsar is not only 100% veggie but also 100% alcohol free, we both wanted long cold beers to mark our return to the normal world. The liveried waiters made a fine performance of pouring and presenting our Kingfishers and then left us to ponder the menus. Considering that the closest thing to fancy service for the previous week had been scruffy waiters rubbing the old curry off plastic coated menus with a swift swipe on their trousers, we were suitably impressed by the waiting skills of the staff at Zen. The Zen staff wear black trousers and waistcoats over crisp white shirts with black bow ties at the neck. It's always nice when the staff aren't wearing the food.
To start I had Prawn Tom Yum soup (not a surprise to anyone whose ever read any of my other oriental restaurant reviews - I always have PTYS) and hubby had Lemon and Coriander Vegetable soup. Both were beautifully presented and excelled in their subtlety and balance of flavours. At a suitable interval after we finished our starters and had our beers topped up, the main courses also arrived. We shared two dishes - a steamed fish in soy sauce and Szechuan tofu - served with plain rice. The waiter dished up the food with an impressive silver service style which isn't that easy to deliver with a whole fish. As we ate, he popped back to top up our plates and take another order for some beer and even when we'd finished our food we were enjoying the atmosphere so much that we were left to linger over our beer for a long time without any attempt to hurry us on our way.
My notebook from the holiday reminds me that the meal came to 1300 rupees which is around £16 for the two of us. A large part of that was the beer which is marked up to a shocking degree in any up-market restaurant so that a standard bottle of beer (I think we had about 3 in total) can easily cost as much as a main course. However, whilst 1300 Rp was the most expensive meal we had on that particular holiday (with many costing less than 100 rp for two people), it still represented excellent value and we were more than happy to pay for the quality and atmosphere of one of our favourite restaurants. And to put it into further context, our meal the year before at the Spice Route (the Imperial Hotel's restaurant that is one of the top 10 oriental restaurants in the world) had set us back about five times that amount.
We were very lucky to get a table at 7.30pm on a Friday night so my advice would be to book or to go early. You won't regret it.
Zen Restaurant10
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