Kiyan at Dusit Devarana uses only home-grown fruits and vegetables. Chef Nishant Choubey offered Iknoor Kaur his limited menu
A walk through stone slat corridors leads you into a meadow surrounded by water. A wooden bridged passage takes you to a restaurant snuggled in one corner where a big branched tree forms a part of the ceiling architecture and catches your eye instantly. With greenery all around and a subtle fragrance of jasmine, Kiyan at Dusit Devarana greets you with modern ethnicity that’s addictive. Before we took our places at the neatly laid out table by the pool, we were busy admiring the sumptuous nature enveloped in the middle of a populated NCR. Spread over eight acres, the Thai hotel has only one multi-cuisine restaurant in the entire property. Executive chef Nishant Choubey referred to it as a ‘world cuisine restaurant’ instead. “With the exposure I’ve had in the past, I summarised all of it and made a cuisine of my own. Since my background is European, I’ve twisted it the most. But I’ve not mixed two cuisines. In simple words the European cuisine here is modern, Indian is contemporary and Thai is traditional,” he said.
The restaurant has its own kitchen garden that supplies most of the ingredients. “Ours is the only organic kitchen garden in India that produces artichoke. We also have an orchard where fruits like mulberry and jamun grow. Based on the season that these grow in, I make the menu. If a certain ingredient is not available in the garden, we make a dish that doesn’t need that particular ingredient. Thus, we have a menu of only three pages that keeps changing,” elaborated Nishant.
According to him, it’s better to offer five dishes that are brilliant than 50 that are sub-standard. Thus, when he sat down to serve us he had a list of exactly four dishes with occasional palate cleansers. So to clear our palate, we were served a swig of roasted tomato clementine soup which was followed by the appetiser.
For the vegetarians there was smoked beetroot and goat curd salad served with wine macerated grapes, crisp walnuts and organic rucola. The mix of sweet and sour was subtly mixed on plate, tantalising the senses perfectly. For the non-vegetarians, there was foie gras brûlée — the liver of a goose that has specially been fattened — served with brioche and glace prune. While the brioche was toasted to perfection, the juices of the Foie Gras and prune mixed well. The soup came next — home-grown fennel soup with sun-dried tomato crostini. It was creamy and light at the same time. Perfect to keep you hooked onto your meal. To accompany the courses, the bar manager prepared a special mocktail for us called moksha. The mocktail was made with apple juice, cinnamon and honey which was reduced over the flame and then mixed with ginger ale. “The same is also prepared as a cocktail in the restaurant with whiskey. We also make cocktails with asparagus,” said the manager. The entrée was up by now. Sixty degree poached Japanese quail served with red cabbage, orange slaw and onion chorizo compote. The quail was tender and easy to slice into. The additional fennel in the dish was a little overpowering but worked well as a side.
The dessert was a Devarana signature toffee pudding served with caramelised éclair sauce. When they say the dessert ends the meal well, it indeed did. The best part was that none of the dishes were too heavy. A good chardonnay with the appetisers and shiraz with the entrée make Kiyan a wholesome package.