3 Hong Kong restaurants to visit for a modern taste of India
- Jashan, New Punjab Club and Daarukhana are serving up Indian cuisine with stylish plating and fantastic ingredients – without compromising on taste
Harpal Singh Sokhi, a celebrity television chef in India, has been travelling quite a bit to Hong Kong in recent months. His mission? To launch a modern Indian menu in collaboration with long-time Indian restaurant Jashan in Central, which was successfully implemented.
“When I consult at restaurants I try to improve standards,” says the chef, who also travels to the United States regularly to consult at Indian restaurants there.
“When I visited Boston, I found that all the Indian restaurants were traditional, so I thought, let’s improve standards, blend some ingredients that are locally available and improve presentation,” he continues.
Which is what he has done in Hong Kong, introducing such dishes as charcoal sesame chicken tikka (black sesame yogurt chilli marinade, tandoori grilled), royal hara bhara kebab (spinach and green patties, stuffed with mint yogurt, cheese, crispy spinach and guacamole), a mildly spicy Bengali daab chingri – a Bengali-style curry served inside a fresh coconut with stir-fried prawn, green chillies and grain mustard, and slow-cooked braised spicy lamb shanks paired with mashed potato masala and rogan josh sauce. The plating is more Western fine-dining, and he sources ingredients locally.
In fact, the fathers of modern Indian cuisine did just that, sourcing local ingredients to suit local palates, and using French and other fine-dining cooking techniques to forge a modern, more sophisticated cuisine, which up to this point had always been homestyle fare.
“In India, it is more family dining, internationally it’s individual dining,” continues Harpal, who launched his own restaurant chain in India, called The Funjabi Tadka, in 2013.
“When you have an individual diner the curry is too much for one person, so you have to plate it for just one person. So that’s how traditional suddenly became modern because the entire curry and mishmash has to be done on one plate. So a rogan josh could be presented with a naan and some salad on one plate. That’s how the evolution started.”
Around 12 years ago in London, Indian cuisine was experiencing something of a renaissance, and chefs were experimenting with local ingredients and Western-style plating.