(Photos by Chhavi Sharma, team member, Delhi Heritage Walks and Alok Saxena, a regular at our walks)

The month of Ramzaan is a very exciting time in the old city: for locals and visitors alike. The noise, the lights, the crowds and chaos of the old city has to be seen to be believed. Add to it the excitement of Ramzaan and you have an electrifying atmosphere!

So this Friday we headed towards purani dilli for a food walk and to soak in the festive ambience of Ramzaan. For our very first food walk, we invited the noted food critic, Rahul Verma to take us around the lanes in old Delhi and sample its food. Our first stop was chaat at Ashok Chaat corner near Chawri Bazaar metro station. We sampled two kinds of chaat and golgappes too! The speciality with these chaat is that they do not use red chilly but yellow chili powder in all their preparations…The next was fruit sandwiches at Jain Coffee House in Raghuganj. This area was earlier a grain market. The fruit sandwiches made with white bread and layers of malai, pineapple, apple, pomegranate and a special sweet sauce which the owners called jum jum were out of this world! This was one of the discoveries of the tour. We could feel the excitement in the atmosphere as we approached Jama Masjid. The bazaar was dazzling with bright lights, decorations and shops selling brilliant wares. There was an endless line of stalls selling food: sewiyan, rolled and displayed in huge piles…different colours, varied textures…then there were shops selling fried meat: chicken and fish fry was our choice here. A little ahead was the man preparing kebabs: his shop only consisted of his grill and the tiny stool on which he was perched. The kebabs were out of this world…the meat was so soft that the kebabs were tied with a string to keep it all together. A dash of chutney and onion rings on the side added to the zing. The food walk in old Delhi was rounded up with a royal bite of shahi tukda and homemade ice cream in milk and mango flavours!