10:20am Wednesday 30th January 2008
Dilli Altrincham's award-winning restaurant is to launch the town's first festival of Indian food.
The month-long event will coincide with Holi - the Hindu "festival of lights" - which begins on March 22.
For four weeks Dilli will present a unique collection of regional specialities from the sub-continent's 29 states - from the familiar Punjab to the less well-known Chettinad, Mangalore and Pondicherry.
"When Dilli opened three years ago many people, who thought they knew what Indian food tasted like, discovered they hadn't known the real cuisine at all," says chef director, Ravi Bajaj.
"They were used to dishes like Madras curry, Chicken Rogan Josh and others that don't even exist in India. Since then they have come to know our food a lot better but there are still regions of the country that are unfamiliar or completely unknown to them.
"We want people to experience the Halal specialities of Andhra, Assam, Himachal, Karnataka and Kerala along with the foods of minority communities like the Kayasths, Parsis, Brahmins and Syrian Christians."
The Dilli Food Festival will journey around the sub-continent - featuring rural dishes that have often never been written down but are passed by word of mouth from generation to generation.
From areas ranging from deserts and glacial mountains to tropical rainforests dishes that span the tandoori style of the Punjab to mild west coast seafood curries and hot southern sauces traditional family recipes from the days before invading nations introduced meat-eating to the vegetarian country with an Ayurvedic approach that combats health threats by using particular ingredients to help maintain the body's natural balance.
Dilli's outside catering wing will dedicate one day to delivering pre-ordered lunches to the town's businesses and homeworkers to celebrate the famous tiffin-wallahs' of Mumbai who distribute 175,000 homecooked meals a day to city workers.
The Dilli Food Festival will begin on the first day of Holi, the two-day Hindu festival of colours' which, along with Diwali, is one of India's major religious festivals.
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