At the end of January I had a craving for sushi. My girlfriend and I opened Zomato, searched for a well-rated Asian restaurant, and Tao-Fu at the JW Marriott came up. We didn’t look any further and made our way there. Once we’d sat down and the waitress had brought the menus, I asked her where the sushi section was. She looked a little shocked, then smiled and said, “Sir, this is a Chinese restaurant. We don’t have sushi.” That’s when it clicked. Looking around, I should have known. The room is done in the red and yellow you’d expect of a Chinese restaurant, with square lattice partitions between the tables, soft yellow light, and a bar along one side with a DJ playing next to it.
It was a happy accident. My disappointment at not getting sushi soon wore off as I scrolled through the iPad menu and started reading about the dishes. It’s beautifully done, with one dish to a page, a description of how it tastes and a picture of how it looks. Since Covid I’ve used a few poorly made digital menus, but of all the restaurants I’ve been to, this is the best-executed one so far. So many of the dishes on it looked like the ones I used to eat in China.
When I lived in Dalian, there was a big mall behind my hotel, and I went there for dinner often. I don’t like gravy dishes, so what I ate there was the dry, wok-tossed stuff, heavy on Sichuan chilli. The moment I saw Sichuan chilli chicken on the Tao-Fu menu, I told my girlfriend we were ordering it, and the first bite took me straight back to Dalian. It’s a long way from the chicken chilli at Civic Center I grew up on. Both have their own flavours, but these days I prefer the authentic one.
Since that night we’ve become regulars, going back every couple of months, and we’ve settled into a routine. She orders the Shanghai chicken soup dumplings, which come three to a basket, and she has all three. I order the Sichuan chilli chicken, every time. Then we agree on one appetiser neither of us has had before.
Whenever the chilli chicken arrives, someone warns me it’s going to be too spicy, and I just smile. She doesn’t like it much, so these days I don’t even let them serve it onto my plate. I eat it straight from the bowl with chopsticks, which I’m far better at now than I was in Dalian in 2017, when my friend Sarath often had to ask for a soup spoon so I could gobble my food. I finish all of it: the chicken, the chillies, the Sichuan peppercorns that leave my mouth numb and tingling, the cashews, the garlic, everything. I’m sure Maharashtrians have a good appetite for spicy food, but even most of them won’t eat all the Sichuan chilli. My bowl goes back smack clean every time, and the staff always look surprised, wondering where all the chillies have gone. My fortieth was on the 10th, and we went a day early, on the 9th. My girlfriend planned the evening, and she knows Tao-Fu is my favourite restaurant in Pune. When the hostess showed us to our table, my girlfriend told her she’d called that afternoon. The hostess understood immediately and left. I don’t like surprises much, so I asked what devious plan she’d made this time, and she just smiled wickedly.
The new appetiser this time was a chicken and papaya sizzler, along with our usual two. I had the Yellow Emperor, their signature Chinese zodiac cocktail for the Year of the Ox, and she had a hot toddy. We’ve tried a few of their other zodiac cocktails over our visits, and they do tea cocktails as well. Both are unique and worth trying. For mains we ordered Kung Pao chicken and the sizzling jasmine rice with vegetables in soy chilli sauce. The rice and the sauce arrived separately, the waitress mixed them together at the table, and the result was lip-smacking. But the appetisers had done too much damage, and we ended up taking the rest home.
The plates were cleared and we were waiting for the bill when a large plate arrived with a small cheesecake on it, a candle on top and “Happy Birthday” written in chocolate around the rim. There was a red powder sprinkled around the cheesecake and a small bowl of something red beside it, and I recognised it immediately. It was Sichuan chilli flakes. Later she told me she’d asked them to write “Happy Birthday” in chilli chicken, and they’d said they couldn’t do that. The chilli flakes were the best they could manage, and it worked just as well. I didn’t eat the cheesecake with the chilli, though. Both were too good on their own to ruin.
She paid the bill, which came to ₹8,400 after a 20% discount. It was my fortieth, and I think she wanted to make it special, with a lavish dinner and all those cute little surprises.
If you’re in Pune and want Chinese food that tastes the way it does in China, go to Tao-Fu. Just don’t ask them for sushi.
