First Look: Delhi Institution Chor Bizarre Arrives In Jaipur

I have a theory about restaurants inside hotels: the best ones should have their own entrance. There’s something about walking through a lobby, past check-in desks and luggage trolleys, that makes a restaurant feel more like part of the hotel rather than a destination in its own right. A separate door, on the other hand, says you are here specifically to eat.

Chor Bizarre at InterContinental Jaipur has one, which means I liked it before I had even sat down.

The original Chor Bizarre opened at Delhi’s Hotel Broadway in 1990, although the family story goes further back. Over lunch, founder Rohit Khattar tells me how his family moved from Kashmir and his grandfather opened the hotel in 1956. It eventually passed to his mother and later to Khattar, who studied hotel management abroad before returning to the family business.

Chor Bizarre grew out of another of his interests: collecting things. Khattar is, by his own admission, something of a hoarder. He would return from his travels with old furniture, memorabilia and assorted bric-a-brac; much of what has ended up inside the restaurants has at some point passed through his home.

The Decor: A Thieves’ Market Indoors

The Jaipur restaurant feels like somebody emptied an unusually entertaining attic into a dining room. Retro Bollywood posters jostle with old photographs, antique furniture and vintage curios. There is a Singer sewing machine, a four-poster bed repurposed as a table, and a table displaying historic objects, like a museum panel.

It could very easily tip into theme-restaurant pastiche. Instead, because so much of it has been personally collected rather than procured, the room has eccentricity rather than polish. You find yourself looking around.

Khattar certainly does. During lunch, I watch him ask for the palak patta chaat that has been sitting out for 20 minutes because he wants to see precisely how soggy it has become. Later, he studies a large dining table and decides guests seated in the centre won't be able to get out easily enough; the team is asked to reconfigure it.

The Food: A Very Large Map Of India

Brand chef Srinivas A has been with the group for 19 years, having joined as a management trainee. Andhra by origin, he has an impressively assured hand with the restaurant's predominantly northern repertoire.

Chor Bizarre's menu is enormous in ambition, bouncing from Kashmir to Rajasthan, Bengal and Kerala with stops elsewhere along the way. There are chaats, kebabs, curries, biryanis and breads; the Jaipur menu also introduces several regional dishes that are new to the restaurant.

I had some warning of what was coming. So much so that I was in the gym at 5am that morning, pre-emptively attempting to earn myself some calorific leeway. It was never going to be enough, but at least I could approach the meal with a clear conscience. With a menu this large, there are inevitably hits and misses; the dishes below are the ones that made me pause.

The palak patta chaat was exactly what one wants from chaat: spinach leaves that retain their brittle crunch under a generous cover of icy yoghurt and sweet and sharp chutneys. The Mewari lasooni paneer tikka arrived in unapologetically large pieces, the paneer soft beneath its char and coated in a pungent, tangy garlic marinade. Among the meats, the chicken burrah was yielding and deeply seasoned rather than simply smoke-heavy, while the gosht ki chaap delivered the richer satisfaction you want from lamb.

Then came one of the surprises of the meal: kasundi salmon. Salmon can be a remarkably dull fish, but here, mustard gives it the sharpness and personality it needs. The Bengali kasundi cut through the richness and made what could have been an anonymous piece of fish memorable.

The dish I’d keep returning to, however, is the junglee maas. Chor Bizarre's version of laal maas sits in the broad family of Rajasthan's fiery meat preparations, but it isn't buried beneath oil or chilli for machismo's sake. Paired with the Jodhpuri paratha, crisp, flaky and audibly crunchy at the edges, it was one of the most successful combinations of the meal.

Then there was the dum gosht biryani. Ordinarily, saying a mutton biryani barely tastes like mutton would be criticism. Here I mean something else: the meat has surrendered so completely to the cooking that it barely requires chewing.

By this point, sensibly, we should’ve stopped. We did not.

The zauk-e-shahi was among the best Indian desserts I have eaten in some time: miniature gulab jamuns submerged in rabdi, but with sweetness kept sufficiently under control.

For all its geographical wandering, Chor Bizarre's real culinary identity has always been Kashmiri. Khattar’s family comes from the region, and the restaurant has spent decades serving both the elaborate meat-heavy traditions of Wazwan and dishes from Kashmiri Pandit kitchens outside the Valley. Dishes were served on a tarami (a large shared copper platter). My picks from the platter were the goshtaba, hand pounded cardamom-scented mutton spheres; the fiery rogan josh; and the haaq, traditional greens from the Valley bringing a welcome simplicity to an otherwise rich spread.

Head of bars Varun Sharma has approached the drinks much as the kitchen approaches food, raiding the Indian pantry for saffron, kahwa, tamarind, raw mango, khus and walnut. Unfortunately, I arrived nursing a cold and cough, which rather limited the wisdom of enthusiastically working through a cocktail list. Sharma responded by making me a hot toddy instead. It was warm, beautifully judged and so soothing that I briefly considered ordering a second in the interests of medical research.

A New Address

InterContinental Jaipur is a large hotel with 218 rooms and substantial banquet facilities, and the property is positioned particularly well for weddings, conventions and events. 

Chor Bizarre, however, doesn't feel designed solely for the hotel guest - which brings me back to that separate entrance. 

After a meal of this magnitude, I make perhaps my most sensible decision of the day and head to the hotel's spa for a deep-tissue massage. My therapist finds every patch of gym-induced soreness with unnerving accuracy and works through it. 

By the time I return to my suite, I am deeply relaxed and still very full. The sensible thing would be to eat lightly the next day.

Instead, tomorrow is round two, with Javed Akhtar and Shabana Azmi joining the opening celebrations. I should probably be thinking about eating less. Instead, I’m already looking forward to doing it all over again.