That would include sampling some authentic Delhi food: succulent kababs at Karim’s (next to Jama Masjid); chaat (from the chaat-wallah who sits outside the UPSC office on Shahjahan Road); and rich, buttery Mughlai food at Moti Masjid (Malcha Marg). There are other highlights too: the delightfully filling but light and inexpensive South Indian food at Sagar (Defence Colony); lightly sweetened vegetarian meals at Farsan (M-Block Market, Greater Kailash), and an aromatic cup of cappuccino at Barista.

And for those who’ve just about had enough of Indian food: splendid teppanyaki at Oriental Bloom (Ansal Plaza, August Kranti Marg); melt-in-the-mouth risotto at Flavors (Moolchand Flyover, Ring Road), and to-die-for waffles with ice cream and sauce at Big Chill (East of Kailash). Bon appetit!

Quick Tips:

If you’ve a sensitive tummy, drink only mineral water--and make sure the seal is intact when it’s brought to you; the best brands include Bisleri, Aquafina, and Kinley. Avoid raw foods--especially salads and yoghurt, and if you’re visiting Delhi in the summer, keep away from dairy products--including cream, yoghurt, and the local cottage cheese (paneer).

One last tip: if you’ve bitten on a fiery chilli, the best remedy is to eat some yoghurt, or something sweet--don’t drink glassfuls of water; it can often make matters worse!

Best Way To Get Around:

A lot of Delhi’s best eateries lie in popular markets, close to each other, and it’s easy (if you’re a devoted foodie) to do the rounds on foot once you’re in a particular area. Connaught Place, which is fairly close to Paharganj, is crammed with places to eat, as are South Extension, M-Block Market (Great Kailash), Defence Colony Market, Friends’ Colony Community Centre, and Pandara Road. If you’re staying within walking distance of any of these places, it’s very easy to actually find a new place for dinner almost every night for a fortnight or more.

The range of coffees on sale runs the gamut from espresso (about Rs 25 a cup) to mocha, cappuccino, and (my favourite!) latte, all of them about Rs 40 a mug. Additional flavours--tiramisu, Irish Cream, buttered rum, hazelnut, and more--cost Rs 20 extra per mug. Cold coffee, juices, granitas, and milkshakes also appear on the menu, but are (obviously) fewer in number. As far as food is concerned, you can choose from sandwiches, quiches, savoury pasties, and calzone--okay, though they tend to be fairly dry at the best of times. There are also cakes--brownies, muffins, coffee cake, a seasonal fruit gateau, and stuff like that--but here too quality tends to vary quite a bit. What is always good is the coffee--it’s excellent. A coffee and a cake for one person should put you back about Rs 100.

Among the best Barista stores in Delhi are the ones in Defence Colony (Main Market), South Extension Part-1, Basant Lok, PVR Complex (Saket), N-Block Market (Greater Kailash), and the one opposite Gargi College in Anand Lok. For a glimpse of what they’re all about, check out www.barista.co.in.

My recommendations? Try the Jack Daniels Salmon Steak--a hefty piece of whiskey-sodden grilled salmon, topped with a large knob of slowly-melting herb butter, and served with a gorgeously garlicky potato mash, sautéed vegetables, and garlic bread. Splendid!

Average cost per person, for a smoothie, a main course, and a dessert should be about Rs 500. A great place to go, especially if you’re American and feeling a wee bit homesick.

Now for the food. This place has been called one of the best restaurants in India, and there’s reason for it. Their chef-cum-owner’s a Sicilian (who left Sicily because of the Mafia), and he sure knows his stuff. The menu’s huge, offering everything from very garlicky bruschetta to salads, open-face sandwiches, pizzas, pastas, risottos, and traditional Italian grills. Among the items I’d recommend are the very good spaghetti carbonara, the blue-cheese-and-sausage risotto, the pasta arrabiata, and the chocolate mousse--but try anything, really: it’s all excellent.

On the flip side, the staff are pathetic: a bunch of dull-eyed young waitresses with little skill and even less enthusiasm. If you can catch their eye and get them to come and attend to you, it’s fine; if not, you could end up waiting quite a while for whatever you want.

No liquor available, but there are juices, fizzy drinks, and cold coffee. The portions are huge, and a main course with a dessert is usually enough for most people--it should cost you about Rs 500 per person.

The thoroughbred Delhi way of drinking chai is, however, the way it’s served at countless tea-stalls across the city. Every street, no matter how non-descript, has a local chaiwallah. If he’s small-time, he’ll carry a wire `cage’ with a dozen glass tumblers, along with a large, squat kettle of hot tea. If he’s posh, he’ll have a little stall- with an aluminium counter, a small kerosene-fired stove, and a row of glass jars, filled with eats. There’ll be buttery, delicately sweetened biscuits (cookies, to Americans); crisp twists of savoury pastry, studded with whole peppercorns; and deliciously flaky discs known as `fain’.

Any time is chai-time in Delhi- but the best time is on a cold winter morning, when a steaming glassful of chai is the perfect thing to wrap cold hands around- and warm your system up! Once you’ve found a chaiwallah on a neat street corner, take a seat on the wooden bench which is likely to be around. Anytime between 7 and 10.30 in the morning, you’ll probably find a cross-section of people- invariably men- sitting around. Some will be chatting, many will be reading the newspaper, and all will be sipping chai.

How it’s made is no secret. Tea leaves are thrown into a kettleful of boiling water with a generous dose of other ingredients- crushed ginger, cinnamon, cardamom, a few cloves or peppercorns, and more often than not, a handful of tulsi leaves (tulsi’s a spicy Indian cousin of basil). Sugar- again a massive dose- is added, along with plenty of milk. The decoction’s allowed to simmer and stew, and ladled out every few moments to eager customers. Along with, of course, a few cookies or maybe a large piece of fain. The chai comes in a thick glass tumbler, perched on a china saucer. You balance the eats on one edge of the saucer, or if you want to do it the way many do, you ask for another plate, put the eats on that, and pour your chai into the empty saucer. And slurp.

Friends of mine swear that’s the best way to enjoy chai, though I must admit I’ve never tried it. But even sipping chai sedately from a glass, nibbling at fain, and getting a taste of Delhi waking up to a new day- that’s good enough. What’s better, it comes cheap- not more than Rs 15 for chai, cookies, fain and interesting company.

Recommended chaiwallahs:
Opposite Kashmiri Gate
Malviya Nagar Market
DDA Market, Munirka
Almost anywhere in Chandni Chowk!

To elucidate. Kathi kababs can probably best be described as wraps- a large, round piece of bread, thinner and softer than a tortilla, on which an egg is broken, and the whole thing deftly turned onto a red-hot griddle to cook. Once the egg’s done, huge amounts of interesting ingredients- chicken, egg, whatever, but all well-spiced- are piled on. Generous lashings of mint chutney, a hefty squeeze of lime juice, and a good fistful of very thinly sliced onion complete the picture. All of it is deftly wrapped up in a paper napkin (which I’ve never quite been able to figure out the use for: kathis are usually so greasy that the paper napkin is in tatters by the time you’re halfway through your kathi, anyway!)

For the hard-core carnivore, there are chicken or mutton kathis (billed as `single egg, single mutton/ chicken’ or `double egg, double mutton/chicken’- which means that one or two eggs, as the case may be, have gone into each kathi). For vegetarians, paneer kathis- made from the firm `cottage cheese’ so popular in India- are available. And that’s about it. A limited selection, but very good- and fast, too.

Delhi may not be Calcutta, but it has some good kathi joints nevertheless. Check out Nizam’s in Connaught Place (Nizam’s is actually a Calcutta brand, and in Calcutta itself they make these absolutely divine kathis from cow’s udders. Sounds awful, I know, and I didn’t know they were udders until years after I’d first eaten them- by which time it was too late). Other good kathi places include Kathi Express in B-Block Community Centre, (Vasant Kunj); House of Kathis (N-Block Market, Greater Kailash, and Safdarjang Enclave Community Centre), and the guy who puts up a stall to the right of PVR cinema in Saket. All are small places- in most instances just a take-away counter- but they’re great to fill up an empty space.

A kathi should cost about Rs 30 for a veggie one, around Rs 60 or slightly more for a chicken or mutton one.

First, an explanation: `Chor Bizarre’ is a pun on the word `chor bazaar’- `thieves’ market’. India has a tradition of local markets- in most major cities- where stolen stuff lands up- antiques, old paintings, even a lot of pretty useless stuff. And Chor Bizarre’s USP is that all its furniture, and almost everything that contributes to its décor, has been bought from chor bazaars across India. Enter the restaurant through a heavily carved wooden door, and you’ll probably find a lot to interest you. The tables are an eclectic lot- a silver-plated, glass-topped one; a converted four-poster bed; a converted sewing machine; a marble-topped one- and more. An amazing clutter of curios lies across the three rooms which form Chor Bizarre: an old gramophone, American advertisement posters from the ‘50s, old Coca Cola posters, a huge cello, pretty handpainted ceramic, a spiral staircase bang in the middle, which curls its way up into nowhere- and the pièce de resistance, a 1927 Fiat, which acts as a salad bar.

Chor Bizarre’s décor may be as bizarre as it gets, but their food’s good, hearty Mughlai and Kashmiri grub. The Mughlai food- characterised by the liberal use of butter and cream- is fairly common across the city, but Kashmiri food is still little-known, and Chor Bizarre does a really good job of it. The food’s mutton-rich (Kashmir after all is very cold), and usually fairly mild. Among the best dishes are the gushtaba, velvety meatballs cooked in a cardamom-scented yoghurt gravy; roghanjosh, a fiery red mutton curry which looks more spicy than it is; spinach cooked with ginger and aniseed- and the finale, kehwa- a traditional Kashmiri green tea, which is brewed with cardamom and cinnamon, and served with a spoonful of chopped almonds in the cup. If you like the idea of Kashmiri food, opt for the Kashmiri tarami on the menu- it’s a table d’hote which gives you a good introduction to the cuisine.

It’s good- try it out! A meal for two, without liquor, should cost about Rs 1,000.

The Great Kabab Factory has an unfussy décor of dark wood, orange and deep blue, with copper utensils and uncluttered tabletops. A display kitchen, glass-fronted and neat, occupies the far end of the restaurant, and if you’re really interested, you can stand (or sit) on this side of the glass and watch the chefs at work.

But to get down to brasstacks- the kababs. The best way to savour them is to order a table d’hôte meal- Rs 345 + taxes for a vegetarian meal, Rs 395 + taxes for a non-vegetarian one . What it gets you: salad, 4 or 5 different types of kababs; 4 or 5 different types of rotis (including delectable ones like the rich, lightly sweetened sheermal , best eaten with a curry); a dal , a vegetable dish, a biryani , and 2 or 3 desserts. The food’s uniformly good, (and for those who can’t handle spice, take heart: there’s spice here, but it isn’t hot!). and here are my top favourites:

Galouti kabab : a melt-in-the-mouth mutton kabab, very delicately spiced and a specialty of Lucknow. If you can’t include Lucknow in your itinerary, get the galouti here- it’s just as good.

Tandoori chicken : Okay, everybody knows this one. But The Great Kabab Factory does it really well . Succulent, with a tiny pinch of tangy , lots of paper-thin sliced onions, and a gorgeous smoky flavour which very few can replicate.

Biryani : Rice, tender mutton, raisins, nuts and fried onions- great combo, and these guys do it very well. Have it with the raita , a light yoghurt relish with a hint of spice.

The stalls are leased to artisans from across India for 15 days at a time, and they set up shop with whatever they’ve on sale- a range which is really extensive and pretty representative of India’s vast store of handicrafts. Stunning textiles- tie-and-dye fabric, embroideries, silks, and more-, carpets, terracotta, basketry, bamboo and cane furniture, tribal art, handmade paper- all of it turns up in Dilli Haat’s many stalls- and always at great prices: you’d probably pay double the amount for the same thing elsewhere.

And anybody who comes to Dilli Haat to go shopping ends up, after a hectic bout of haggling, at the food stalls which spread across the back half of the complex, beyond the handicraft stalls. Each state of India- and the country has 29 of them- has a stall here, serving traditional food. The food stalls are all pretty bare-bones: just a brick-and-cement kiosk, devoid of any decoration except perhaps a few tatty state tourism posters- and seating consists of plastic tables and chairs which are scattered across the courtyards around. You sit at a table, wander up to the kiosk you want to eat from, place your order, and wait for it to be brought- and what’s good is that if you’re in a group, all of you can actually place orders at different kiosks, sit at a central table, and eat together.

With all that variety (29 states- and each with a distinct culinary style?!) you might have a bit of trouble deciding what you want to eat. So here’s a very brief summary of what I’d put on a must-eat list:

Maharashtra state stall: Try their sabudana khichri- a delightfully mild risotto-like dish concocted from sago, ground peanuts, fried potatoes and ginger. A similar croquette made from sago, called sabudana vada, is also excellent.

West Bengal state stall: Check out their fish roll- a fish croquette which comes piping hot, with tomato sauce on the side. And boy, if you think this is gonna be anything like what your nearby café serves up, you’re in for a surprise- the Bengali fish roll comes well-flavoured with onions, cilantro, garlic and lots of spice. Their Mughlai paratha- a flaky, ghee-laden bread stuffed with spiced ground mutton- is also good, though it’s rather too greasy. For afters, try the mishti doi- an earthen cupful of creamy yoghurt sweetened with date-palm sugar.

Mizoram state stall: These guys turn out perhaps the best momos in town- delicately steamed dumplings stuffed with lightly spiced pork, mutton or chicken (pork’s the best, but may be better to avoid if your stomach isn’t too strong). It comes with a bowlful of very light broth, and a paste of coarsely ground red chillies on the side. Make your own combination- as spicy or mild as you like!

Rajasthan state stall: The Rajasthan state stall has some truly great stuff, and one of their best dishes is the potato-and-onion kachori. It’s a large (just slightly smaller than a quarter-plate) fried pastry which is stuffed with a spicy potato and onion mix. It’s served with a hefty dollop of mint chutney and tamarind chutney on top.

That’s four of the best- four of my favourites, at least. The others serve some really good food too- Jammu and Kashmir has excellent gushtaba with rice; Tamilnadu dishes up fabulous dosas, and Kerala’s fish curry with rice, though fairly fiery, is out of this world. Try a little bit from here and a little bit from there- but whatever you do, don’t succumb to the temptation of consuming the `Western’ food most of the stalls sell- the sandwiches, salads, and burgers are invariably awful.

On the whole, a filling meal, no matter which stall you eat at, shouldn’t come for more than Rs 150 per person. Alcohol isn’t served in Dilli Haat, but you could try the ubiquitous `fruit beer’- a fruity, bubbly and oversweet product. Make sure that they give you a bottled drink, though- in some stalls they simply add water (from God knows where) to a fruit beer concentrate.

Entry tickets to Dilli Haat are Rs 10 per adult, Rs 7 per child. The complex is open from 11 in the morning to 10 at night, but most souvenir-sellers start shutting down their shops by 8.30 or 9.

The Nahar-e-Bihisht was, unfortunately, not quite as paradisal as some would have liked to believe; the court physician, a Hakim Ali, after an inspection of the water, decreed that it was foul enough to kill off much of Shahjahanabad. Alternate sources of water were scarce, so the solution which was proposed by Ali was a simple one: add copious amounts of spice to the water before consuming it--spice enough to kill off any germs which happened to be lurking. What was born was chaat--spicy, tangy--and so mouthwatering that I’m yearning for some even as I type!

Anyway, for the uninitiated: a note on chaat. What it’s all about, what goes into it, and where you can get it.

Firstly, chaat’s a very wide-ranging term for a host of dishes--all of them the snack variety which you eat standing on the pavement, trying to keep the sauce off your shirt while you get jostled on either side by friends and strangers vying for a second helping. Chaat can run the gamut from deep-fried spicy potatoes to chopped fruit sprinkled with spice--and a lot in between. Not all of it is hot enough to blow the top off your head: in fact, it’s a combination of spice, sour and sweet which makes chaat what it is--irresistible.

Secondly, the essential ingredients are many. These include boiled potato, boiled gram, chopped onion, mint chutney, puffed rice, tamarind chutney (delightfully sweet-and-sour), whisked plain yoghurt, chopped cilantro, and a host of edible things you may never have come across: little deep-fried squiggles of savoury gram flour batter; tiny coins made of savoury pastry; and golgappas--crisp hollow spheres, deep fried to a luscious golden, then punctured with an adept forefinger, filled with potato, topped up with a generous spoonful of a spicy liquid, and popped into your mouth before the whole thing disintegrates down your front.

Chaat is a Delhi institution, and chaat-sellers are ubiquitous: they pop up everywhere, from the fashionable environs of Greater Kailash’s M-Block market to the bureaucratic alleys of Shahjahan Road. Small-time guys will usually have a folding table or a push-cart on which they’ll mount an array of vessels containing the ingredients they use. Larger shops will have a food warmer, and a large iron griddle to fry "aloo tikkis"--delicious potato croquettes which are served with a generous dose of mint or tamarind chutney.

If the idea of eating at a roadside stall scares you--well, hygiene is never an issue with most of those guys--try some of these places:

Eatopia (Habitat World, India Habitat Centre, Lodhi Road): Very clean, plastic-glove-and-disposable-plate chaat. What’s good is that the chaat has all the authentic flavour without the fear of germs--and the area (a food court) is itself a smart, clean place where the staff’s friendly, fluent in English, and helpful. Another advantage of eating at Eatopia is that all their chaat is made with mineral water.

Haldiram’s (Various locations: check out the one on Ring Road, Lajpat Nagar): Like Eatopia, Haldiram’s too is the modern version of a chaat eatery--nice and clean, and with a larger selection of chaat. They also serve a mind-boggling selection of Indian sweets, just in case you want to douse the fire after a spicy round of chaat.

Bengali Market (Near Connaught Place): Bengali Market has a number of good chaat-shops, not as sleek as Haldiram’s, but good nevertheless--and easily accessible from Connaught Place, the heart of Central Delhi.

If you don’t give a damn--or are immune to "Delhi Belly"--then the entire city’s your oyster: go where you want, and you’ll find a chaat-wallah!

Chaat--depending upon what you’re eating and where--typically costs less than Rs 30 a plate. At any rate, however, you should be able to eat well within Rs 100.