Hyderabadi catering in Bangalore

The seat

The Hyderabadi chef seals every handi with dough and times the dum by the smell of the rice, not by a clock. It is the only seat in the kitchen allowed to be late by four minutes.

There is biryani, and there is Hyderabadi biryani, and most Bangalore caterers serve the first while calling it the second. Kacchi biryani — raw marinated meat cooked under the rice, sealed, on dum — is a technique with no room for error, which is why it is normally avoided at scale. The Hyderabadi seat cooks it at scale, in handis of forty portions, sealed on site and opened at the counter so the guest sees the seal broken.

The rest of the Deccani table travels with it: salan, baingan, pathar ka gosht cooked on a granite slab at the counter, and the sweets — double ka meetha, khubani — that the city's Muslim families expect at a walima and rarely get done properly.

For a Bangalore corporate lunch, biryani is the single most requested dish in the city, and the seat runs a biryani-and-salan menu for offices that sits well under the reception band.

What the Hyderabadi chef cooks

• Kacchi gosht ki biryani
• Murgh dum biryani
• Haleem (Ramzan season)
• Mirchi ka salan and baghare baingan
• Pathar ka gosht
• Lukhmi and shami
• Khubani ka meetha and double ka meetha
• Qubani, sheer khurma for Eid

From the other seats

Dishes we pair with this cuisine at one event — each cooked by its own chef, never by this one.

• Thalassery biryani from the Kerala seat at the same reception — two biryanis, two chefs, a conversation at the counter
• A North Indian tandoor counter for the kebabs
• Kunafa or a Middle Eastern dessert from the Mediterranean seat for an Eid table