Beyond the hotel bubble, Delhi is a city of roughly 20,000 registered restaurants and an estimated 80,000-odd unregistered ones — the latter being a polite way of saying “places whose relationship with paperwork is, shall we say, casual.”
Not all of these will agree with your stomach. But hidden in that vast, unruly sprawl are genuine gems: holein-the-wall joints serving dishes so good they’d make a Michelin inspector weep into his clipboard, if only he could find the place on Google Maps.
Delhi’s dining landscape is a jungle — lush, rewarding, and best navigated with a machete of local knowledge. And to start you off somewhere, I have created a list of the places where I would take my friends.