Many of our guests reach us on the same day they have walked through the Taj Mahal or Agra Fort, with the real thing still in their eyes. A dining room cannot compete with that, and ours does not try to. What it tries to do is carry some of the same vocabulary — arches, screens, pattern and light — into a room built for a long meal.
In this article
The Arch
The pointed arch is everywhere in Mughal building, from the great gateways to the smallest niches cut into a wall. It frames a view, and it divides a space without closing it off. In our room the arched detailing does the same job on a smaller scale: it breaks a single large floor into places that feel like somewhere to sit, rather than rows of tables.
Carved Screens
The jaali, a stone screen cut into a lattice, is one of the most recognisable things in Mughal architecture. It lets air and light through while keeping a space private, and it turns hard sunlight into a pattern on the floor. You will have seen them at the Taj Mahal around the cenotaphs, and at Itimad-ud-Daulah.
The carved screens in our dining room borrow the idea: they separate tables from one another without walls, and they give the room its texture.
Pattern Underfoot
Mughal builders rarely left a surface plain. Floors, walls and ceilings carried geometric and floral pattern — in inlaid stone at the grandest end, in painted plaster and tile elsewhere. The patterned floor tiling in our room is a nod to that habit.
Art on the Walls
The walls carry Mughal-era artwork, including a framed panel on Akbar, the third Mughal emperor, whose kitchen and whose habits we have written about in The Mughal Kitchen and Akbar's Vegetarian Days. The Mughals themselves were serious patrons of painting; the imperial workshops produced illustrated histories and portraits in large numbers, and a room dedicated to their food felt like the right place for some of it.
Warm, Low Light
The lighting is kept warm and low, the way a room lit by lamps would have been. It is also practical. Most of our guests eat in the evening after a long day in the sun, and a bright, hard-lit room is the last thing anyone wants at that point. The light is set so that the table and the food are the brightest things you can see.
A Room for an Occasion
Because the room is broken up by arches and screens, it works for a table of two and for a large party at the same time. We host birthdays, anniversaries, corporate evenings and family gatherings; see private dining for how that works. We are on the 2nd floor of Jobaaj Complex, Fatehabad Road, opposite Howard Plaza, in Tajganj, open from 12:00 pm to 12:00 am every day.
