The Hindu Business Line : Lunch from Tokyo, dinner from Paris...

Lebanese, Japanese, Greek, Mediterranean, Continental, Thai, Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese... Delhiites have the world on a platter. A checklist of some popular international options in the Capital:

Japanese

Sakura, Hotel Metropolitan Nikko: Having clean swept awards for its cuisine and service, there's little that five-year-old Sakura needs to prove to punters. Except perhaps continue to delight its eclectic fans — the Japanese expat community/toffee-nosed bureaucrats/hoi polloi — with its above par offerings.

The restaurant's biggest strength is its well-crafted menu that includes an exhaustive selection of sashimi, sushi and noodles complemented ably by rice/steamed/oven simmered dishes and paired with fine New Age wines.

The Japanese believe that you eat with your eyes. Hence, be prepared to be entertained at this 74-seater restaurant, done up in quintessentially Japanese minimalist décor, with chef Nariyoshi Nakamura's beautiful dishes, each composed like a picture.

Especially the chef's sublime salmon yaki (grilled salmon suffused with a piquant miso paste) and the habit forming ebi tempura (deep-fried prawns served with fish stock and a sweet rice-wine based sauce).

For sushi lovers, there's a repertoire of over a dozen fillings, including mackerel and yellow tail.

For time-strapped foodies, there's Sakura's quaint Bento Lunch Box (veg: Rs 1,180 and sushi: Rs 1,980) with food arranged meticulously in different slots. The salad is a mound in the centre, while simmered foods are arranged all round, like in a landscape painting. Grilled fish is served on a platter, head facing left.

Dishes are garnished with fresh veggies. (With so much thought for food — or is it food for thought — how can one go wrong?

Meal for two: Rs 3,000 approximately

Chinese

Taipan, The Oberoi: Latticed screens in polished teak, walls sheathed with priceless silk, tasselled lanterns and regal Oriental chairs. It's Singaporean chef Thian Kiat's gastronomic excursion at one of the Oberoi group's spiffiest eateries. The Gandhis sup here. As do Bollywood biggies. Not to mention the retinue-in-tow politicos who come here as much to gawp as be gawped at.

The eclectic fare goes from the subtle Cantonese to the fiery Szechwan, with a huge accent on authenticity. Thus, much of the kitchen ammo — including oyster sauce, mushrooms, century eggs, lotus bean paste and abalone — is imported to heighten flavours. The result? Baked spicy pomfret on banana leaf, lobster on steamed egg whites, fried chicken with dry tangerine peel, diced duck with water chestnuts... And, yes, the famed Peking duck with its ritualistic onsite carving!

For calorie-crunchers, there's a dim sum lunch (Rs 825) that serves a soup and a selection of 15 kinds of dim sums — all wheeled in on a trolley. Now, if only the waiters would remember to clear your table in between courses, this could be a cracking good place to dig into some exemplary chow chow.

Meal for two: Rs 4,000 approximately

Continental

Orient Express, Taj Palace Hotel: Rated one of the world's finest 50 restaurants, it rubs shoulders with legends such as the Lafayette at Hotel de Paris, Monte Carlo, The Grill at The Savoy, London, and Gaddi's at The Peninsula Hotel, Hong Kong.

The 36-seater with its understated elegance (and a favourite haunt of Delhi's Page 3 parivar) evokes the romance of partaking haute cuisine in an actual train car. That is, the fabled Orient Express or Europe's ultra-luxe train. Hence, impeccable service, gold-plated crockery and mellifluous live jazz by American Krista Kellner. The menu? A gob-smacking four-course meal, which traces the Orient Express's journey through Europe, culling specialities from each region.

We begin with superb hors d'oeuvres — `Escalope of duck liver on a bed of Californian prunes' and `Apricot relish with a raspberry vinaigrette' and a soup of `Pan sautéed wild mushrooms and grilled zucchini with Champagne Cream'.

The entrée consists of `Oven-cooked pink prawns scented with fresh mint and truffle oil' followed by a round of natural sorbets as palate cleansers. The Plat Principal — ostensibly the piece de resistance — consists of `Supreme of corn-fed chicken-filled zucchini and smoked chicken confit on a bed of Apple'. Fed to bursting, we don't let the dessert — `Peach Financier with amaretto and roasted almond ice-cream' — pass us by either.

Cost per pre-plated four-course meal: Rs 2,395

Thai

The Blue Elephant, Intercontinental, The Grand: When you are located smack in the heart of town at a vertiginous 28th floor, commanding a heart-stopping beautiful view of Delhi, food might become peripheral to your scheme of things. But no... The Blue Elephant — done up like a lush tropical garden with handcrafted artefacts, exotic flowers and a cascading waterfall — does not let you down.

The evocative interiors — done up by Yves Burton, who is also the architect for the entire chain of six Blue Elephant restaurants worldwide — are further enhanced by the waiters' Thai costumes as well as the crockery, cutlery, serving dishes and glassware, alloutsourced from Thailand.

What this famed crockery brought to our table were Chef Visarut's flavourful dishes, which burst forth in a cascade of colour, fragrance and taste. To begin with, there was Tom Yam Koong soup, a magical broth spiked with spicy prawns. The luscious satays — chicken, pork, fish, prawn, squid — accompanied by assorted sauces were delightful as was the Ginger Lobster, the taste of its pink innards offset by al dente bits of ginger, lemon grass and a hundred other yummy things. Dessert was a mélange of carved tropical fruits and homemade puddings. B-l-i-s-s!

Meal for two: Rs 4,000 approximately. The restaurant also offers an all-veg menu.

Ramesh Sharma/Location courtesy: Sakura

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