Eat, Eat and Eat

Not unexpectedly it happened once again. It’s been happening with such unfailing regularity that I have ceased to be surprised. I read that in the past three days alone as many new hotels have popped up in Hyderabad, more specifically, in Jubilee Hills. On Friday in the pages of The Hindu I read about the opening of ‘Aisha’ at the Park. It seems that the restaurant has been designed by Tarun Tahliani, who I thought did only clothes. The news report gave all the usual stuff about the hotel except its location. Maybe they assumed that everyone who reads their paper knew where The Park is located. Honestly I do not know and I wouldn’t be surprised if it is in Jubilee Hills.

Two days after coming across that news item, on Sunday I read in the columns of the same paper about two new hotels being opened. Yes, two restaurants and both of them in Jubilee Hills. The first restaurant, described as a boutique business hotel, is the Nanotel located in Madhapur which is just a stone’s throw from Jubilee Hills. I was impressed to read that this hotel is open 24X7 which is exactly what the Jubilee Hills crowd must have been waiting for all these days. What to do if you are feeling hungry at 3 AM?

The second restaurant I read about was ‘Circle 9’ at SVM@36 which is again located in Jubilee Hills. Apart from their swank homes, glitzy cars this is what I’ve come to envy about the crowd out there in Jubilee Hills. Imagine living amidst so many fancy restaurants that you needn’t bother to cook at home. I really do not hold anything against the Jubilee Hills crowd and it really doesn’t worry me that almost everyone who wants to open a restaurant is choosing to do so at Jubilee Hills. However I’ve begun to worry when I read that Nanking has shifted table, plate and bowl to Jubilee Hills like there aren’t enough restaurants there already. It has moved from Secunderabad where it had been dishing out its delectable fare all these years. I do not know what prompted that move but I guess the crowd in Secunderabad wasn’t just up to their mark. Or maybe it was the parking problem. Nanking was the only high class joint that I happened to have dinner at a long time back, twelve years ago to be exact. Of course, I did not dine there again and also do not remember what I had there for dinner that night in 1998.

Anyway, I do not grudge the folks in Jubilee Hills their food but the fancy restaurants there can’t hold a candle to what we get here in this part of the city. If there’s any place in Hyderabad where people cannot complain about there not being enough good eating places to go to then it must be Jubilee Hills. Someday I plan to visit each and every street in Jubilee Hills and actually count how many restaurants are there in that posh area.

Undoubtedly, the most overused part of a Hyderabadi’s body is the mouth which takes in quite a lot from paan, chai, beer to biryani almost all day. Now that Haleem season is upon us there is one more item for us to stuff into our mouths for about a month. It’s something a lot of Hyderabadis have been waiting for eagerly.