How it began
Born as a Facebook community, the Delhi Gourmet Club was created for the informed pursuit of good food by ‘Mr Old Monk’ and celebrated cookbook writer Rocky Mohan, food blogger Atul Sikand (of Sikandalous Cuisine, Facebook’s largest recipe-sharing community), and acclaimed food and wine writer/blogger Sourish Bhattacharyya. It started as a group – sharing ideas and information about eating out and dining in, and has today expanded to an offline club with an online membership of 5,500-plus food lovers.
The Delhi Gourmet Club was created for the informed pursuit of good food by ‘Mr Old Monk.’
Objective
The objective the Delhi Gourmet Club was to provide its members with curated gourmet experiences that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to get as walk-in customers in the finest restaurants in Delhi/NCR. The word of the Delhi Gourmet Club is now regarded by the hotel and restaurant industry as a valued seal of approval, which is evident from the pride of place the industry gives to the awards being given out from time to time by the club for Delhi’s ‘Best’ Butter Chicken, Burger, Pizza, Seekh Kebabs, Dosa, Maa Ki Dal and Chholey Bhature. The juries of the Delhi Gourmet Club are constantly on the move, keeping tabs on the best food Delhi has to offer, and discovering hidden gems for the benefit of its members.
When the Delhi Gourmet Club was launched, the founders said that the community would devote its time and energy to discovering and celebrating the national capital’s best-kept culinary secrets, and honouring its most talented chefs and enterprising restaurateurs.
This promise has been honoured. The Delhi Gourmet Club has organized 60 events over the past two years which has taken the club to several premier five-star locations. The Delhi Gourmet Club has also organised walks to discover Delhi’s heritage cuisine at Chandni Chowk, and have recently completed the most comprehensive survey ever of the national capital’s chhole-bhature options – the jury checked out 32 places offering Delhi’s favourite dish and its findings kept the city abuzz for some time.
Partners of choice
The Delhi Gourmet Club has been the partner of choice for:
- The national launch of Odyssey, the world’s only triple malt from John Walker & Son at The Chambers
- The exclusive club of The Taj Mahal Hotel
- The House of Montes and Brindco to unveil Taita, Chile’s most celebrated red wine
- Napa Valley’s foremost name – Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars
- Top Bordeaux labels such as Chateau Palmer and most recently, Chateau Branaire Du Cru
- Swedish automaker Volvo
- Akira Back, the eponymous restaurant of the Korean American celebrity chef
Legacy
The Gourmet Passport is considered to be one of the club’s most noteworthy achievements and the following it has in the hotel and restaurant industry is evident from the far greater number of places that have signed up with it, not only in Delhi, but also in Mumbai. A similar milestone has been the Delhicious Week, which was launched last year in partnership with the world’s largest deal-of-the-day website, Groupon, offering the experience of price-fixed curated meals to non-Club members. For the inaugural edition of Delhicious Week, five restaurants signed up; the number went up to 11 for the second. The club hope to see the number of partner restaurants go up to 14 by the next Delhicious Week, scheduled sometime in October this year.
In the first edition of the Gourmet Passport, the founders had said that the Delhi Gourmet Club “can now claim to be the premier online meeting place of the national capital’s exquisite food lovers, the purveyor of finest gourmet experiences, and the marketplace of good food information”. Today, it’s no longer a claim. It’s a fact acknowledged by the city. If there’s a group of food lovers who define Delhi’s refined eating habits, it is the Delhi Gourmet Club.
Founders of DGC – Rocky Mohan-Atul Sikand & Surissh Bhattacharyya
The founders
Rocky Mohan
An ambassador of Indian cuisine and the author of four books, Rakesh ‘Rocky’ Mohan brings to his table the passion for cooking that he has inherited from his illustrious grandfather – Narendra Nath Mohan – who bought over the British alcobev firm Dyer Meakins and gave the country Old Monk rum, and his father – Ved Rattan – a Rajya Sabha MP and the Deputy Mayor of Lucknow. Rocky has cooked for India’s former prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, taught Britain’s celebrity TV show host (Rick Stein) how to cook chicken korma – a recipe that was reproduced in some leading U.K. newspapers, and written in the best-selling cookbook – Art of Indian Cuisine (Roli Books/Lustre Press). His other books are Wazwaan: Traditional Kashmiri Cooking, where he has presented the never-before-shared recipes of the famous Ahad Waza, Kohinoor of Rice and Spice, and Rocky’s Table (HarperCollins), where he presents six menus for entertaining in style. A lifelong exponent of Indian cuisine, Rocky has also contributed popular, long-running columns for the Hindustan Times, Indiatimes.com and the now-defunct India Today Plus.
Atul Sikand
As founder and chief whip of Sikandalous Cuisine (the most popular recipe-sharing page on Facebook with 20,000 members.
He launched his Facebook page (a journalist friend suggested the title because of his allegedly scandalous ways) a couple of years ago to promote his blog of the same name, but it has grown into a community of more than 20,000 members, from Canada to New Zealand, with a prodigious appetite for perfection in the kitchen. The beauty of the recipes is that they are simple, they are critiqued by members, and they provoke impassioned discussions. If you love cooking, you don’t have to travel far to get better at it.
Sourish Bhattacharya
“People eat to live, or live to eat, but Sourish eats to write and writes to eat.”
After devoting 28 years of his life to active journalism, in 2013 Sourish decided to go solo as a freelance journalist, food columnist, restaurant critic and blogger. He writes a bi-weekly Op-Ed column on food trends titled ‘Fortune Cookie’ for Mail Today and also contributes regularly to Mumbai Mirror, Times Life, India Today Travel Plus, India Today Spice, Man’s World, Time Out and The Black Book. He is also the co-founder of the Delhi Wine Club and has interviewed some of the leading wine personalities of the world, including Angelo Gaja, Aurelio Montes, Bruce Cakebread, Frederic Engerer, Pierre Lurton, and the Chateau Margaux trio of Paul Pontallier, Alexandra Petit-Mentzelopoulos and Thibault Pontallier. He is also an active blogger – recording restaurant trends around the country and interviewing personalities defining the business in indianrestaurantspy.blogspot.in. People eat to live, or live to eat, but Sourish eats to write and writes to eat.
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