Tyde Puts A New Spin On Classic All-Day Dining

You’re at one of the tables at the end, away from the ceaseless honking of the clogged heart of the capital. At Tyde, the serene new all-day, multi-cuisine restaurant that opened at The Park hotel in Connaught Place, lunchtime feels like being in an older time in a newer way.

You’re gazing at the menu. Alternating beige and blue pages feature alternating impressions of ocean tides with contrasts deepening through to the end across its three acts. It’s a beautiful menu—let no one tell you to not judge a book by its cover and a restaurant by the way its menu looks.

It’s not just a beautiful-looking menu. You will find what you want to make this one of the better decisions of your life. It will tide you over the slightly sweet welcome drink and the vexing traffic situation there’s no choice but to go back to.

Exhibit A is the exquisite House-Made Pasta & Risotto selection. I'm usually unforgiving with my spaghetti pomodoro, but this version will easily win anyone over—the tomatoes taste like they remember being tomatoes, reduced slow and unhurried into something that clings to each strand rather than pooling apologetically at the bottom of the bowl. There’s a confidence to the seasoning here, a chef who trusts the produce enough to leave it alone.

Ditto for the pizzas—Pesto, Wilted Spinach & Mascarpone; Prosciutto de Parma; Trio of Mushrooms & Tartufo—each one a study in restraint dressed up as indulgence. The bases are blistered just right, char without collapse, and the toppings never fight each other for attention; the truffle in the mushroom pizza lingers more than it announces itself. Tyde excels in the way it moves from wood-fired pizzas and za'atar-spiced aubergine to a Kerala-inspired Black Cod Moilee.

The Classic Delhi 6 section is up next, a reminder of the unapologetic culinary indulgences that comprise the OG culinary tradition of the Capital. Lahsooni Dal Tadka, Chandni Chowk Ke Chhole, Dal Makhani, Butter Chicken, Nalli Nihari and Chaat Bento nod at the old city where the story of the fabled capital began. This section of the menu also takes on the rather stiff and contentious challenge of offering a Kathal Biryani at a venue that’s quite clearly a Delhi institution by ambition.

But that’s the very spirit of churn and return that Tyde seems to revel in. And it practices that not with a declaration, but with a smile and a suggestion.

The lunch menu at Tyde does something that few other places in these geographical coordinates do: a cracking selection of bentos, available with Thai sticky, brown and jasmine rice options. We go for the Cantonese Bento, featuring kimchi, seafood siu mai, wok-tossed fish in black bean sauce, XO fried rice—a compact, compartmentalised little universe where nothing bleeds into anything else and yet everything belongs together. 

The kimchi lands with its bite intact, cutting cleanly through the richness of the black bean sauce; the siu mai are plump and unfussy; the XO fried rice, easily the section’s unpretentious showstopper, carries just enough funk and heat to make you reconsider ordering a bento for yourself next time instead of sharing.

The best way to take in the elegant decor, its indigo tones married to warm brass details, is with the cocktail menu. The Caribbean Chai is something I am going to return for. While I was there, I took a liking for The Spice Route, a creative rum cocktail mixed with spiced jaggery and bitters. The martini, named Memsahib, is the kind of drink you sip slowly on a languorous evening to take in completely the fluidity of ambience that it’s designed to channel.

Tyde’s visualised and rendered as a design-forward dining venue by the Australian design studio Woods Bagot. Dar Badar, a striking recycled-materials installation by artist Mohammad Intiyaz, is the centrepiece, calling attention to water access and anonymity of individuals within that structure. Textile works by Hansika Sharma, titled Fragments of the Ocean and Within the Ocean, is the current that runs through its design spirit.

The restaurant sits right across the road from Jantar Mantar, the three-century-old observatory built by Maharaj Sawai Jai Singh II of Jaipur. And by adopting the symmetry, lines and structural precision of the monument-instrument, Tyde serves to remind diners of the unique prestige and history of this place that has accumulated a different kind of telling-the-time reputation owing to its status as designated protest site in the past decades.

By the time you’re done wondering about all that, it’ll be time for sweet nothings, paired quite brilliantly with the sweet things on the Tyde menu. Sink into the Chocolate Sunken Cake, curling your flavour toes to the vanilla pod ice cream melting slowly over the walnut crumble. I’m not a Fresh Fruit Platter-in-the-name-of-dessert person but they’ve got everyone else covered. If you can kill for Anjeer Badam Halwa, the knockout punch of this chapter, the sugar- and gluten-free pudding can keep you sinning without paying for it.

The house-made ice cream selection combines classics like Vanilla Bean and Sundae, and funky experiments like Maple & Pecan, Til Gur Chikki and Filter Coffee & Almond with Monk Fruit. Take your pick, adjust your sails. The tide has shifted.