MC Recommends: The best of food, cars, books, drink, and design this week

Feliz, an open-air fine dine restaurant at Doubletree by Hilton, Goa.

The Great Indian Drinks Festival

Right through the two-year-long pandemic, we saw the launch of several Indian craft spirit and wine brands. And yet, most missed out on face-to-face interaction with consumers via tastings and events, the first milestone that brands cross in a bid to popularise themselves.

The Great Indian Drinks Festival—spearheaded by The Dram Club, a whisky enthusiasts club—is set to offer that opportunity to Made in India spirits brands. To be hosted at La La Land (Atria Mall) in Mumbai on April 23 and 24, the festival will showcase homegrown spirit and seltzer brands. Expect to find stalls dedicated to gins, beers, spirited meads, ciders, feni, and of course whisky, wine, and rum.

“We were thinking of hosting a festival on Indian craft beers but ended up creating a platform that celebrates all Indian craft spirits. It will offer consumers a chance to taste wines and spirits...and choose the ones they like to take home,” says co-founder Swati Sharma.

Among the spirit brands we are excited to taste are some of the meads and Two Indies Rum.

Cool luggage for your next (big) trip

Stylish luggage spells out your coolness factor far more than your airport look, and there are several new ones to choose from. Stella McCartney has launched a new range under her iconic Falabella range. Like all her products, the bags are made from vegan leather (no animal skin was used) and have brown trimmings. Price: Rs 82,000.

Falabella travel bag, Stella McCartney

Horizon 55, Louis Vuitton’s new luggage, is inspired by Marc Newson’s work, widely acknowledged as the most influential industrial designer of his generation. The lightweight carry-on has a flat interior thanks to its large external case. Price: on request.

Horizon 55, Louis Vuitton’s new luggage

Globe-Trotter’s new suitcase features all the elements of a traditional one in a more compact size. This leather-encased beige suitcase costs Rs 95,000.

Globe-Trotter

Samsonite’s minimal EVOA Tech luggage offers a wide array of security features: 3-in-1 smart lock, TSA approved fingerprint lock for efficient one-touch opening, anti-theft zipper with magnetic zipper puller, and 3-digit dial lock and USB port. Samsonite’s partnership with Panasonic also sees the inclusion of the Seekit™ Bluetooth Tracker, enabling travellers to tag and track their luggage.

Now your car interiors are vegan

In a world increasingly obsessed with concepts of sustainability and veganism, luxury car brands are paying obeisance to the trend by adopting, in some of their models, interiors that are anything but leather. Land Rover’s Evoque comes in non-leather vegan-friendly alternatives made using sustainable materials such as wool-polyester blend and Eucalyptus Melange, a hybrid plant-based product that consists of 70% polyester and 30% tensile fibres. The wool-blend product is a combination of synthetic suede material and wool, produced using 53% recycled plastic bottles, and was developed by Land Rover along with Europe’s leading textile company, Kvadrat.

BMW i3 is 95% recyclable and is made mostly from carbon fibre and at the end of its life, it will be recycled rather than dumped into landfills. The vegan-friendly materials used in this car include pure new wool, eucalyptus wood, and kenaf, a fibre plant native to east-central Africa. The Porsche Taycan is the first fully electric Porsche sports car with vegan leather interior options. Consumers can choose between two interior choices: vegan microfibre and tanned club leather made using Race-Tex, a high-quality material partly composed of recycled polyester fibres. These future-ready models are being rolled out across the world.

Land Rover’s Evoque comes in non-leather vegan-friendly alternatives.

Chef Pooja Dhingra’s oh-so-delicious cookies 

Chef Pooja Dhingra.

Everything Chef Pooja Dhingra puts out is beyond delicious. But with Le15 patisserie’s new range of packaged cookies, she has excelled by getting the flavour blend and packaging pat-down. There is a Crunchy Toffee Cookie that marries the taste of butterscotch and cashews, two ingredients that will evoke childhood memories of butterscotch ice cream. But then she has added her twist with coarse sea salt and cornflakes to create a unique sweet-salty flavour profile. If Signature Pink Cookies are made using cherries, almonds, and corn flakes (which add crunch), Dark Chocolate Hazelnut Cookies are enhanced using sea salt. I, however, plump for the creamy Brown Butter Pineapple Cookie made using almond and corn flakes, mixed with candied pineapple pieces, and topped with a white chocolate drizzle. Delivering across India!

Dining with a view of Mandovi

Evenings are the most spectacular on Mandovi River which runs across 48km of Goa’s hinterland: Brightly lit up cruise boats take tourists on a joyride, birds fly back home, seagulls dive for food till the sun sets, and when it does begin to set, a river that looks fiery expanse of orange. Doubletree by Hilton Goa frames the river in all its shimmering beauty from almost every corner, but more particularly from the dining destinations designed to let you dine to the views of the river. It helps that they put out some good food.

Stopover at the poolside for cocktails and watch neighbourhoods across Mandovi come alive with city lights. Book a High Tea experience which is set in a garden under mango trees, and get treated to open cucumber sandwiches, pastries, creamy beetroot on rice crackers, green peas burger, and the famous view, of course. Comida, an all-day dining space, is where you can dine on pan-seared salmon with cherry tomato salsa asparagus and maple balsamic sauce, and Tagliolini Al Funghi with porcini mushroom, herb, and parmesan cheese.

But the real deal here is Feliz, an open-air fine dine restaurant at Doubletree by Hilton Goa, which is open in the evenings. Here, Chef Vidhya Gawas has curated a Goa-inspired artisanal menu. Prawn Dangar is a cutlet flavoured with tamarind and coconut, Curried Fish is a pan-fried seasonal fish served with moilee sauce, while Mushroom Kaju Tonak has mushrooms and cashews tossed in fresh coconut and spices.

About ‘cavities’ and other things

Every few months, Chef Prateek Bhaktiani, one of the finest chocolatiers and pastry chefs in India (he runs Ether), puts out a beautifully produced

Cavities by Chef Prateek Bhaktiani

magazine/bulletin called Way Too Many Cavities. The last edition, which can be downloaded, focused on gorgeous travel cakes with not just the recipes and ingredients by some of India’s best pastry chefs, but also detailed facts about the composition and the role some of the ingredients play. The current edition has three pastry chefs and one cheesemaker creating different kinds of cheesecake.

This one is leading to a great cause: Chef Bhaktiani has launched an opt-in programme under which chefs can donate 10 per cent from each sale to Aashiyainz, an organization feeding the hungry through the platform.

While the thought behind the venture is noble, what we love is the sleek quality of the publication, which is suffused with great photographs, insights, and recipes. The internet is a haven for free downloadable books on food for those with a passion to cook, and for those who love to see striking food photographs. In Libri Book’s Better Baking, Genevieve Ko, a recipe developer, and writer, puts together pastry recipes made using healthy oils, olive oil curd and maple syrup sweeteners.

Openculture.com has a rather interesting vintage book on Jell-O, the American dessert icon, the cover of which a woman in an apron ordered “all 7 flavours”. From an ebook on modern Indian food to a rather cheeky Startrek Cookbook and even a book on The Karl Lagerfeld Diet, there is a lot here to choose from!

The Plated Project coalesces art and welfare 

In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, distressed by the hunger crisis unfolding in India, brand strategist and consultant at Chlorophyll Brand & Communications Consultancy Chitresh Sinha had an idea to use art to deal with the crisis effectively. He began The Plated Project as a digital, direct-to-consumer business to sell decorative plates; it now also sells dinner plates and tableware.

The venture was inspired by an ad on Instagram that said, ‘Hunger kills more people each year than Aids, malaria and terrorism combined’. A portion of the sale of each product goes into sponsoring meals for the hungry. So far, they have sponsored 5.25 lakh meals across the world.

The project collaborates with over 100 artists from India and countries such as Norway, Poland, and the US, to create these decorative plates. You end up buying a bespoke work of art and doing good along the way.

Chef Pooja Dhingra's three-quarter plates

Every month is dedicated to a theme. Pastry chef Pooja Dhingra, for instance, helped come up with images that depict happy childhood memories about food, which cover three-quarters of the plate, leaving one-quarter blank to depict how difficult it is to create happy memories on an empty stomach.

Sometimes, it is the literature or poetry that inspires the plates, like the new Raabta dinnerware collection inspired by Urdu poetry about love and longing.