IF you want to have some great Chinese food with an outstanding French or Italian wine, have Karan Johar, Suzanne Roshan and Gouri Khan at the next table noisily bringing in a birthday, the gorgeous former model and dancer Rukshana Eisa sitting across you and daintily telling you what dimsum to order and how to fold your napkin when you are finished, and Bombay Chinaman ‘TT’ of the erstwhile Nanking restaurant
insisting on ordering your meal and watching you eat, then go to China White for dinner. It will be an experience like what you have never had in Bombay. Not even the great Nelson Wang, whose restaurant China Garden is his theatre, can promise you such a fulfilling meal.
This is Bombay’s youngest Chinese restaurant. It is a fine dining place. Meaning, you will not find American chopsuey and Manchurian chicken on the menu. Instead, there is lobster in black bean and supreme crab steamed with ginger and spring onion. This is part of the menu. It does not replace the chopsuey and Manchurian chicken. Nothing does, actually, because the menu at China White is pretty eclectic. It is Cantonese food. But how many diners know what that is? Or the difference between Cantonese and Szechuan, for that matter? For most, Chinese is Chinese. And what matters more is that you may have a whole golden-fried chicken with lemon or pepper for Rs. 400 only at China White. Or a Mandarin (filet) steak tenderloin with chili oil for
Rs. 225. Astonishingly, the lobster is for Rs. 900. Which must be the least expensive lobster in all of Bombay,
the Mangalorean seafood eateries of South Bombay to note.
In the posh foodie district of Bandra in Bombay’s western suburbs, where China White has sprung up on Turner Road, the rates are a absolute steal for a gourmet restaurant. But that is the way the restaurateur wanted it to be. There is a time to marvel at a restaurant’s pricing and a time to do justice to the food. At China
White you make time to do both. So raise your bone china bowl of jasmine tea in salute to the restaurateur and eat hearty. The food is good, no, make that damned good, the ambience is fairly spectacular, and Bandra is not too far down the road wherever you live in Bombay.
The name, yes, is a bit unusual for
a restaurant seeking to give North Bombay its first taste of bona fide Chinese cuisine. We can let that claim pass because the menu at China White is certainly unusual and wonderful if not the very first attempt at authenticity in a Chinese restaurant over there. Not that there aren’t any decent Chinese restaurants that part of town. There are. Only they are housed in five-star hotels. Where the heavily taxed bill at the end of the meal stings as much as the several courses you had before it delighted and teased the tastebuds.
But Bandra has been singularly unlucky in its Chinese restaurants down the years. Which is why the Nepali-run streetside variety, the Flaming Dragon and Hungry Eyes meals-on-wheels kind on Linking Road, have flourished and even been encouraged to even set up shop
in garages and building basements. Happily for Bandra, now there is China White, all of 150 seats and
plenty of place in the lobby and out on Turner Road to wait for a table in case the restaurant is full. And
once there, if you find the name unusual, then you must ask the restaurateur, Mustafa Eisa, what he was thinking of when he named the place. You will find him easily. He used to be a well known fashion model himself. And you will recognise him from the ads he has featured in. Vimal, Thums Up, Goldflake and Cinthol are those that come to mind at once. Most evenings when he is
not traveling on his other business, which is interior designing and furniture, Mustafa is at China White.
I did not bother to ask his
wife, Rukshana, about the nomenclature of their restaurant. She is easily one of the most ravishing women
that part of Bombay and there were better things to ask her over the top of a flickering candle and clinking
wine glasses than where they got the name China White from. Like what had she been doing over the years since I last saw her. She was one of Bombay’s most rocking dancers and in-demand models who gave it all up to fly and get married in the Eighties. Two-and-half decades ago when I first saw her, Rukshana was drop-dead gorgeous. She still looks that way today though not a day older than what she looked 25 years ago. Amazing. She is still flying. Now for Pan Am-Delta, earlier
it was Gulf Air, and she runs a popular and successful grooming school for corporate houses that teaches etiquette and other things. The Eisas have a daughter, Zara, who is 11. “So you see…” Rukshana shrugged elegant shoulders, “I am busy taking care of China White when Mustafa is not around, I run the finishing school, I am still flying three-four days a month, and I have a growing daughter to look after.
I will describe the restaurant to you. Having designed over 30 food and beverage outlets, Mustafa had a definite idea what he wanted for China White. His décor concept is clean and contemporary, more international
than Chinese or Asian, the walls are in cream and gold and lend a feeling of warmth. Clever lighting (done by professionals from Paris and the Philippines) augment a rich and luxurious look. The chairs are from Japan, sofa backs brushed with crushed antique velvet upholstery from Milan, the crockery has been selected from Singapore, the cutlery from Italy. On the whole, the décor is comfortable and soothing. The restaurant is split level, or rather, three levels. Fortunately, the service is efficient and does not take your attention away from the food.
Now the food. Mustafa claims
that China White is the only restaurant in Bombay with an all Chinese set of chefs. He has Dominic Ho,
ex-Mandarin, as his executive chef and about 10 more chefs handling the main kitchen and dimsums who have been brought down from China and Hong Kong. “Three more are coming from China who specialise in Hunan food,” he said. “They will be down in few days, I went and selected them myself.” His furniture business takes him four times a year to China. That is where Mustafa developed a taste and understanding for real Chinese food. “It just wasn’t the same stuff I was getting back
in Bombay,” he complained. So he decided to start his own Chinese restaurant and leave the kitchen
to experts at the cuisine. “We are strong at the backend. I wanted the focus to be only on food. This is not a lounge bar but a restaurant,” he said. And helping him spearhead the backend operations is my old friend TT or Sem Chi Ling, whose vast knowledge of Chinese food is only hidden by his roly-poly size and jovial nature.
The menu is a mixture of dimsums (Rukshana said they are the best in Bombay, better even than Royal China), Cantonese, Hunan and Szechwan dishes. Like I said earlier, it is an eclectic menu, jumbo crab steamed
with chilli and garlic and served with a variety of sauces; crispy aromatic duck wrapped in pancake and served with plum sauce; lemon pepper chicken; prawn rolls; wasabi prawns; mushroom dumplings; sliced fish with sweet corn sauce; stir fry prawns with fresh mango; tenderloin with pickled ginger and pineapple; stuffed shitake mushrooms with vegetables and asparagus sauce; rice cooked in lotus leaf; shell fish – yes, and most unusual, is it not. This is the kind of menu Mustafa wanted. “No fad foods, no fly-by-night novelty fare ideas, but seriously good food for those who appreciate Chinese cuisine,” he said.
I would recommend that you place your meal in TT’s hand once you get to China White. Specify your preference, your choice of meat, what you like in seafood, what you want to avoid. And allow him to suggest a menu for you. If you are ordering a bottle of wine to go with your meal, and you must – jasmine tea is not enough, then ask restaurant manager Achin Wong’s help. Mustafa has filled his restaurant not only with Chinese kitchen hands, but also with the service staff, who are mostly Bombay and Calcutta Chinamen and who know most of the city’s gourmets and fastidious diners between them.
Mustafa, it is pleasing to note, has
a constant eye on the kitchen.
His direction everywhere. Though not yet three months old, he is constantly seeking to change and upgrade things
in China White. For instance, while trying to adapt the Cantonese food somewhat to suit Indian palates, he
sat with the Hong Kong chefs and worked out a ginger-chilli oil that
goes amazingly well with the seafood dumplings. Now, he is looking at
using China White and his new set
of Hunan chefs to start Chinese banqueting in Bombay. This is something nobody is doing in a big
way. Hunan is a spicy food, best suited to Indian palates, and it is the cuisine most used for banquets in China. So
his mind is ticking in that direction.
It is a healthy trend. For Bandra and
for Bombay.
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China White, Bombay’s newest Chinese restaurant, has an 