Olive celebrates 20 years of serving good food with oodles of glamour in Delhi's old cowbelt

New Delhi, March 7 (IANS) When AD Singh opened the Olive Bar & Kitchen in 2003, 'Conde Nast Traveler' ranked it as one of the 'hottest' new restaurants to be launched that year around the world.

Having perfected the delicate art of mixing gastronomy with good-looking people and creating aspirational venues in Mumbai, Singh carried the burden of high expectations, but he did not let his fandom down.

Singh launched an European fine-dining restaurant with a Mediterranean look on the ruins of the stables of a 19th-century Delhi merchant in the shadow of the Qutub Minar in Mehrauli. It continues to be packed and oozes class on any day of the week, despite Delhi's dodgy reputation of being the Republic of Butter Chicken.

Together with the fashion store Carma, which had opened much before Olive when Mehrauli was literally a forgotten piece of wilderness on Delhi's outer fringes, Singh transformed this swathe of the cowbelt into a destination where the Capital's rich and powerful would order their Manish Malhotra and Sabyasachi at Carma and then walk into Olive in their Christian Louboutins to let their hair down over sangrias and thin-crust pizzas.

And in a neighbourhood that's seen restaurants open and shut shop with alarming regularity, Olive, like Carma, has not only bucked the high mortality rate, but also survived a Supreme Court-mandated sealing of restaurants and fashion stores in Mehrauli and of course Covid-19, which struck the industry like nothing else before.

Maybe it was fated to survive, because Olive opened when memories of the 1999 Jessica Lal murder at a celebrity party in the Qutub Colonnade, which was run by the socialite Bina Ramani, were still fresh and continued to give Mehrauli a bad name.

The Colonnade gave Delhi a taste of haute culture in the decade before Olive opened, but it died along with Jessica Lal, and its sealed building not very far from Olive and Carma, was in those days a constant reminder of what could go wrong with a restaurant that had become the next preferred hangout of the city's moneyed elite.

As Olive celebrates its 20th anniversary in Delhi, and Singh straddles over a restaurant empire with multiple brands across the country, its secret sauce combines three win-win ingredients -- a captivating ambience lorded over by an ancient banyan tree, an ability to keep tickling the palate of its well-travelled guests, and an exciting drinks menu that keeps pace with the restaurant's food spread curated by Dhruv Oberoi, its young executive chef.

Oberoi has bravely integrated classical Indian ingredients (amla, for instance, or chow chow, or 'aam aada') into European dishes, an experiment that had made Singh initially very nervous, thus creating his own version of what he calls 'glocal cuisine'.

Ironically, it was Singh's childhood dream to make it to an IIT, and he was mighty upset when it was his twin brother who walked the fabled IIT-IIM route. Singh therefore settled for the next best option -- flying off to the US for higher studies -- and returning to work for blue-chip companies such as TCS and Cadbury's, but he soon realised his heart was in the food business -- food shaken and stirred with dollops of glamour.

It has been since 1988, when he organised the marriage party of his sister on a barge in the Mumbai harbour, and got inspired to launch his first food events business called Party Lines, that Singh has been in the food business and seen many swings of fortune, but he can now look back at an array of milestones, not the least of which has been the Olive at Mehrauli defying odds and turning 20.

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