The advent of luxury restaurant brands in India means that new trends are now being introduced in our midst with an alacrity that would have been impossible even a couple of years ago. One of these is the ?fab lunch deal?.
In all the dining capitals of the world, lunches are often the best kept secrets of the gourmet world. You may be expected to shell out, say $ 200 for dinner per person at Sushi Yasuda, New York?s famed fish paradise on the checklist of every trendy diner, but lunch comes for roughly one-tenth of that price with a prix fixe menu that includes five pieces of fish, two rolls and a tart. It?s the same at many other destination restaurants. So much so that foodies look out for these deals and take the opportunity to visit the establishments during lunch hours instead of dinner, where the tab could be a bank-breaking experience.
In India, no special attention had been paid to lunches till now. While the handful of restaurants that truly come under the super-fine dine category remain shut during the leaner day hours, others, more casual places, sometimes do boring ?executive lunches? and similar ?packages? to drive their business, where the prices hit the bottom, but so does quality and certainly no discerning foodie would willingly settle for that. In any case, the market that these restaurants aim to cater to is different from the luxury-gourmet one.
This season, however, seems to be seeing a change. Megu, the New York Japanese food brand, at the Leela Palace hotel in New Delhi, has just introduced its lunches, where you could sample the inventive offerings at almost half the price that you would pay during dinner. Dinner roughly works out to R5,000 per person here, but a three-course lunch could cost you just about R1,800-2,500 approximately because you get to pay only for the main course, while your choice of appetiser and dessert is free.
The choice is extensive and the menu is almost similar to the dinner menu with a couple of new additions, including stuff such as grilled waghyu skewers that have proved to be a big hit in the Indian market?beef being a surprisingly popular option at least in Japanese restaurants here. There are also the Japanese curries and the restaurant serves one with soft-shell crab as another recent addition. And then there?s the sushi with inventive and new offerings, including a superb black truffle-yellow tail maki and seared tuna.
Who are these lunches targeted at? Typically, the discerning business executive who does not necessarily want to do a big, show-off meal that dinner in the same set up would involve. More importantly, in Delhi it is the large pool of ladies-who-lunch in groups or simply upwardly mobile foodies who dig the lifestyle that make up the market for these meals. But, of course, like in the West, if you are just a foodie, who simply wants to check out the restaurant without wanting to burn a hole in the pocket, tracking these lunch deals can be very rewarding.
Similarly, Hakkasan, the other international brand in our midst, has also introduced the fab lunch deal on weekends recently in Mumbai. (The restaurant already serves a three-course set menu for weekday lunches at R750.) For a stupendous meal of eight small plates, seven mains, rice, noodles and desserts, you pay R1,800 per person as opposed to the dinner cost that comes to an average of R2,300 per head.
Indian brands like Shiro that pitch themselves as upscale but much more casual restaurants have also upped the ante. Shiro has just introduced a deal where for just R1,000 (except on Sundays, where the brunch is pricier) you can eat anything and all that you want from its menu (with conditions). The brand already had dim sum and sushi lunches for R850 per person. But with this new offering, it is clearly looking at a growing market, where people are more willing to experiment and food is a larger expression of an increasingly sophisticated lifestyle.
The writer is a food critic