Haldi is part of the same restaurant group as our favorite, Malai Marke, along with Chote Nawab and several others. The renowned chef Hemant Mathur, most recently of Tulsi, has become the executive chef and a part-owner of this group, and changes are being made,  though I’m not sure it’s for the better.

I had feared that the management change might result in higher prices, though so far this has not happened. This was our first time at Haldi, so I can’t compare with how it was before the change, but what I did notice immediately is that the extensive menu I had been studying on the website had shrunk significantly. Now my fear is that Malai Marke will suffer the same fate. The impression we have is that he’s not changing the food, which would be pretty hard to improve on, but reducing the number of choices as a cost-cutting measure. We’ll have to wait and see.

For the most part, the food we had was very good, on a par with Malai Marke. The fish fry with mustard, was perfectly all right but not exciting. We liked the chingri malai, shrimp in coconut cream served with luchi bread, very similar to the jinga luchi at MM. The dak bungalow chicken was nice, as was the goat biryani, though I had expected to have one of the other goat dishes I saw on the online menu, both of which were missing from the new menu.

The beer selection is limited, unlike at MM.