The Travel Critic

Martabaan by Hemant Oberoi is, on paper, everything you want in a high-end Indian restaurant. Hemant Oberoi, the man himself, is culinary royalty. You expect fireworks—layers of spices, textures that dance, aromas that seduce. What you don’t expect, though, is a restaurant that feels like a dentist’s waiting room lit by a thousand suns. Seriously, the lighting in there is so bright it makes the Sahara at noon look positively dusky. It’s not a restaurant. It’s an interrogation room.

And what’s with the layout? Four booths awkwardly facing the corners, like they’ve been sent there to think about what they’ve done. Meanwhile, in the middle of the room, there’s a massive table for ten, just sitting there, empty, as if it’s expecting some kind of royal entourage that never arrives.

Then came the food. We started with Prawns on the Rocks, which sounds intriguing until it lands in front of you. Six or seven prawns, nice enough, but plopped on a big white plate with all the fanfare of a deflated balloon. Imagine going to a Rolling Stones concert, and Mick Jagger shows up, sings “Satisfaction” for two minutes, then buggers off. That’s what this was. Where’s the rest?

My lamb shank? Tasty, sure. But it was as if they’d sourced the smallest lamb in the world. This was no shank. This was a polite nod to a shank. You’ve got to wonder if the poor lamb was put out of its misery too soon, because there was barely enough meat on it to feed a small pigeon, let alone a hungry diner.

And then, the pièce de résistance. The service. Or rather, the lack of it. They handed us a dessert menu, then proceeded to disappear into the ether. Maybe we were invisible. Maybe we weren’t the VIPs they were saving all their attention for. Either way, no one came back. No dessert, no coffee, no goodbye. Just a fading memory of what could have been.

Martabaan is trying to be something it’s not. It’s trying to be a destination restaurant in a five-star hotel, but the truth is, I’ve had better Indian meals in dodgy Brick Lane joints, sitting under a flickering light, with sticky tables. The difference is, those meals had heart, soul, and a clear understanding of what they were supposed to be. Here? It’s all style, no substance, and even the style is questionable.