Le Petit Chef: Shangri-La Eros, Connaught Place, New Delhi

Le Petit Chef: Shangri-La Eros: Restaurant Name
Phone: +919654956166
Address: 19, Ashoka Road, Janpath, Connaught Place, New Delhi 110001 India
Time: 07:00 AM – 11:00 PM
Meals for two: Rs. 8,000
Cuisines: European
Facilities: Wine, Valet Parking Available, Indoor Seating, 4/5 Star, Table booking recommended, Luxury Dining, Serves Cocktails, Dress Code Applicable

Le Petit Chef: Shangri-La Eros – Decor

Half the fun (and all the novelty) of Le Petit Chef, a French brand, is that there is nothing even remotely like it in our neck of the woods. You certainly cannot compare a live band with this experience. Without giving away too much, the venue is an unadorned room. You book your seat(s) online, mentioning your meal preference: vegetarian, vegan, non-vegetarian, and whether you want to order wine paired with every course or a bottle for the table. The meal starts on the dot of 8.30pm, and because it is brigade service (all the courses are served to every diner at precisely the same time) one has to take the trouble to be seated before time. The audio visual is beamed on to your plate with amazing precision and centres around a diminutive Gallic chef who, true to type, goes about preparing your dinner, course by course, from farm to fork (or from ocean to mountain, as the case may be). When the short, snappy, always humorous audio-visual is over, the lights come on and a team of young servers stream in and serve all 32 guests in the dining room in brigade service. When the image of the tiny (petit) chef goes to, say, Marseilles, along comes a bouillabaisse, and so forth.

Food:

The menu is a French-style, six course meal that starts with fresh burrata with basil dust and surrounded with surprisingly flavourful tomatoes. Our soup course was seafood bisque (that followed the audio-visual segment about Marseilles, where seafood bisque was practically invented.) Next up was truffle chicken ballontine with a surprisingly good cream spinach sauce that not only added colour to the plate but flavour to the sauce as well. The piece de resistance was a magnificent baked lobster thermidor – a showpiece classic that is not often seen nowadays. The dessert – creme brulee with biscotti and fresh strawberries and blueberries – was kept intentionally light so that the whole meal was not too heavy, yet provided enough heft for a memorable, filling experience.

Plus & Minus:

A showpiece dinner that is best enjoyed with your spouse / partner: conversation has to be interspersed with the audio visual and taking pictures and videos!