Road No. 1, Banjara Hills, Hyderabad
One of Hyderabad’s best-kept foodie secrets is the excellent grilled ‘Arabian chicken’ from a hole-in-the-wall joint called Dine Hill, near Chintalbasti. And at the other end of the food chain (no pun intended) is Grill Room, with its great range of grills—everything from chicken to lobster. They give you a useful interactive selector that lets you choose your own personal combination of meat, sauce and carbs: Lamb chops with honey-mustard and jacket potatoes? Pomfret with lemon-garlic and fries? Salmon with rosemary and rice? Our own favourite is the grilled tenderloin with pepper sauce, seared and slightly charred outside, but pink and juicy inside.
They have a glass-walled kitchen, so you can watch the chefs at work. Their stick-foods are also good: try the satay and the garlic-calamari-on-a-stick. Grill Room is run by veteran chef Shankar Krishnamurthy and, like its sibling Fusion 9, it’s one of the few restaurants in town with a consistently high standard. And yes, they have a vegetarian menu as well. But if you’re going to order gobi and paneer, you’re probably in the wrong place.