If you visit a newly opened restaurant, chances are that the chefs have plagiarized the recepies of the renowned chefs and given them their own hard-to-pronounce fancy names. They forget that the magic lies in the hands and fingers of the master chefs that prepare the food and not in the ingredients.

It takes lots of time, perseverance, experimentation and above all an inventive genius to create a recipe for a gourmet food. It appears the chefs at the newly opened Zafrani Zaika have overcome all these mental hiccups and have come up with classic Indian food that is an all time favorite with the gourmet food lovers.

Want to taste  murgh parcha kebab and seekh pasanda? Both are flat pieces of grilled meat. The golden colored murgh parcha kebab @ Rs 375 is “an escalope of chicken flattened and marinated in curd and almond paste before being grilled,” while their brown colored  “seekh pasanda is a flattened piccata of lamb with khus khus and ginger-garlic marination.”

Another variation on kebab is the seekh boti kebab. It is a unique mixture of boti and seekh kebab which exudes a subtle flavor.  Prepared without any raw papaya, it just melts in the mouth the moment you take it in.

The Shahjahani shikhampur @Rs 350 is cooked with tender pieces of lamb meat. They are filled with hung curd and chopped coriander-mint.  Most restaurants including the deluxe hotels do not take pains to stone grinde the cubes of meat.

But not here.

The meat is stone ground rather than minced. It is for this kind of attention to detail   that Zaffrani Zaika deserves high marks.  Most restaurants, again, cannot maintain parity in quality between the tandoori and the curry preparations. Zaffrani Zaika has managed to do so with excellence.  

 The piece de resistance at the restaurant is the Hyderabadi gosht biryani, which at Rs 475 is probably the finest dish in the city. Raw rice and uncooked lamb are cooked together in the same pot. It is prepared in a classic style exactly as it is done in Hydrabad. 

Address:First Floor, next to BikanerwalaYashwant Place,

Chanakyapuri-New Delhi

Tel 24121520-21

Timings: 12 pm to 3.30 pm              

             7pm to 11.30 pm

Average cost per two: Rs 1,200