Fast Forward 2014: Food

Different places spell different breakfasts. The city can do with an exciting range that broadens choice and meals for foodies

The Guide's Wish List

1. Exciting start to the day
Different places spell different breakfasts. The city can do with an exciting range that broadens choice and meals for foodies.

2. Menu-savvy staff
An attendant is the guide into a restaurant and many choices on the menu. We would like our server to course our experience to the T.

3. An experience in our mouths
Slumber arrests Mumbai as foodies hardly get to interact with food. Why not introduce play-with-fun sessions with items like Sushi / Pizza?

4.Street meets fine-dine
How about a Kala Khatta Vodka Shot or Bombay Duck Fritters? The city has no dearth of inspiration, especially the Chowpattys

5. Food options for all
Throw a stone in Bandra, and a restaurant emerges. Go east or northward and the options dry up. Restaurateurs listening?

6; Timely delivery
The city's huge workforce need food delivery angels who will deliver on time, in perfect boxes, with cutlery and, from west to east.u00a0

My Take Chef Viraf Patel

With the promise of amendment to licensing policies looking probable, 2014 could prove to be an exciting year. If the changes are applied soon enough, we would be happily working longer and harder, and be closer to resembling a metropolitan city of global standards, when it comes to timings. This is likely to snowball into more restaurants offering more choices and hopefully more kinds of cuisine.

Pic/Atul Kamble

I am thoroughly pleased by the growing number of restaurants in South Mumbai but slightly off-put by the variety of cuisines on offer. For a very long time, North Mumbai has been the hotbed of regional cuisine restaurants. I am hoping some of them come to South Mumbai as well, wherein an intense craving of Tibetan food wouldn't call for a drive to a particular western suburb.

It's time to have great cuisines on offer evenly located in the city. Top on my wish list is a larger number of restaurants, which focus on specific cuisines - bringing us more variety to the table. I think Mumbai is ready for a full-fledged Korean restaurant or a Vietnamese restaurant, which doesn't play safe by placing Chinese menu items just to be accepted by everyone. Mumbai has its share of eat-and-go restaurants and its time to up the ante by introducing culture and performances to them.

For a very long time, my wife and I have wanted to bring together all of Mumbai's chefs to share meals and causes together with the hopes of having more fun in what we do and making a difference.

In 2013, a few organisers began creating events involving manyof Mumbai's top chefs. I hope the camaraderie and sharing between the best chefs in Mumbai, continues and grows manifold in the year(s) we are entering.u00a0

Mumbai is ready for a full-fledged Korean restaurant or a Vietnamese restaurant.