Roch

In a city where restaurants routinely balloon to a lakh square feet (I mean, where the Instagram reel begins with a wide shot of the entrance and ends somewhere near the fire exit), Roch is all of 750 square feet. Ten seats. 

One tasting menu with 8 courses. One chef. The interiors are simple (an L-shaped table with comfortable chairs), and you can see the chef labouring. 

Rohit Chidurala was born in Warangal, brought up in Mumbai, and has spent the better part of his twenties cooking in Michelin-starred Restaurant Labyrinth in Singapore and the celebrated Restaurant Gaa in Bangkok.

He came back just before COVID and appeared on Telugu MasterChef two years ago.. ‘Apart from the biryani and the gongura,’ he says, ‘I felt it's time to make sure we go on a global map (with Telugu cuisine) on a different stage.’

Given Hyderabad's current dining moment, all of this is almost surreal. Couple it with the fact that Roch, where reservations are mandatory, offers one of the most interesting meals in the city. For lunch, they’ve got ramen, but go for dinner. Roch runs as a tasting menu experience, changing every season (the coming winter will go heavy on seafood, sourced from Vizag and Kakinada) and is built around Telugu pantry staples refracted through the kind of technique Rohit picked up abroad. Sarvapindi, the rice flour staple of Telangana, is on the menu. So is payasam, but not as you'd expect it to be. More on that in a moment.

The food at Roch

The meal opens with the sarvapindi tartlet, a one-bite amuse-bouche that immediately tells you what kind of evening this is going to be: yoghurt gel, banana chilli, grilled chicken (or dosakaya on the veg menu), and peanut parmesan. The sarvapindi (thin, slightly crisp) works as a vessel the way a tart shell would and has been reimagined by chefs in the past couple of years, and this is a worthy tribute to the dish most people from Telangana (including this writer) consider a part of their heritage.

The rasam chawanmushi is where the technique starts showing its hand openly. Rasam (that thin, peppery south Indian broth that functions as comfort food) has been set as a Japanese chawanmushi custard. The base is built on onions caramelised slowly over four weeks at low temperature, the sugars breaking down without heat, pulling out a deep, tar-like sweetness. Into this go black aamchur and curry, and what arrives is silky, and intensely savoury: a cup of rasam that has somehow become something else entirely while remaining completely itself.

The Paan Taco (where betel nut leaves perform the role of a taco; take a bit with the leaf for a burst of flavour) is the dish people will probably talk about first, because it looks like the most fun. The betel leaf, borrowed from a pork belly preparation Rohit encountered at an Indian restaurant in Singapore, becomes a taco shell here, holding duck (or fermented mushroom and aubergine bhajji on the veg menu), tamarind gel and sesame podi. The fermented mushroom sits for a full week before it reaches the plate. The gongura flower granita arrives as the palate cleanser and stops the table dead. Plum cooked low and slow like a curry (slightly savoury, barely sweet, with the sourness of gongura running underneath) is frozen into a granita and served with a plum curry on the side. It is the most unexpected thing on the menu and the one that earns the longest silence.

The main course on the non-veg menu is mutton neck: twelve hours in the cooker, served with toddy brioche, kalinkaya rice, herb curry and beetroot. The kalinkaya rice is worth pausing on: the berry, native to Telugu kitchens, appears here as a rice preparation, its sharp, jammy character quietly anchoring everything around it. On the veg menu, cabbage gets its elevation through a parmesan podi – borrowing the form of the podi, the backbone condiment of Telugu cooking, and replacing the expected lentils and chillies with aged cheese.

The payasam custard tart is the dessert and the one Rohit considers his most technically demanding dish. Setting it as a custard tart gives him the surface area to work in the fine-dining register: it arrives with bobbatlu cream and strawberry podi, the tart shell holding a filling that has the yielding texture of a perfect Portuguese custard tart while tasting unmistakably of the original.

Why you should go to Roch

The petit fours are where the meal lands its warmest punch. The Rose Toddy Gummy is made with rose vinegar fermented for a month, set with toddy into gummies and finished with fresh rose petals sourced from the rythu bazaar (government-owned farmer’s market) in the neighbourhood of Kukatpally – where Rohit goes himself on market mornings. 

The Sunnundalu Cake (again, a time-honoured Telugu treat made from black gram and packed with protein) and the sesame and jaggery laddoo of Telugu childhoods, reimagined as a buttercream-layered cake, taste a little like a Russian medovik, except with the muscle memory of every Sankranti your grandmother ever made you sit through. It is the clearest possible summation of what Roch is doing: taking the staples of the Telugu kitchen and turning them, gently and firmly, on their head.

The strawberry toddy that closes the evening, clarified to a completely zero-proof clear liquid (so you can drive back home) that looks like water and tastes like a very elegant surprise, is the final proof of the idea. You think you know what you're getting. You don't.