Our first night in Jaipur was the tail end of a very long day that began in Agra with a 4:45 AM wakeup call and a 5:30 AM tour of the Taj Mahal (seeing the sunrise was worth it!) and didn’t end till we pulled up to the very impressive Shapura Heritage House Hotel just before sundown.

So rather than venture out, we decided to have dinner at one of the hotel’s three dining rooms.  This one located on the roof top patio of the 5th floor of the newer wing of the hotel offered a mix of Indian and Western options.

The head chef, a very pleasant man of Chinese descent spent a good amount of time at our table telling us about the city and pointing out some nearby and countryside landmarks visible from our elevated vantage point. We appreciated his comments but found out later that what he pointed out as the “Amber Fort” was in fact a different hill top palace. The best dishes we had that night were a mildly spicy vegetarian Biryani and a minced mutton Galouti kebab.

We enjoyed breakfast each morning in the ground floor Sapphire restaurant, which is also open for lunch and dinner. It offered a very nice buffet with both local and international options. There was an egg station where a chef prepared dishes to order as well as an easy to use coffee machine offering multiple choices for feeding the caffeine monster.

Meals on our first full day in Jaipur turned into an exploration of Peacock restaurants. After a morning of touring the city our guide Sunil took us to The Grand Peacock Restaurant for lunch. We shared a very nice sweet corn soup for a starter and a good version of Murg Tikka Buter and I got a Murg Tikka cooked in a clay pot. The restaurant was very clean and other than a waiter knocking my beer over, the service was good. Following a short discussion, the waiter brought us another beer to replace the spilt one.

After an afternoon relaxing by the pool at Shahpura House our driver Chandi drove us about 5 minutes from the hotel to the Golden Peacock Restaurant for dinner. We’re pretty sure this place has some connection with our lunch restaurant as the two menus were very similar.

We sat at a rooftop table and got a great view of the traditional song and dance show along with tour groups and individual diners in the courtyard below. Our vantage point also gave us a candid view of all the drivers congregating in the parking lot outside the restaurant’s outer wall as well as into the open kitchen where we could see chefs and line cooks preparing the meals. Most interesting to watch was the chef slapping and then retrieving naans and rotis from the inside wall of a tandoori oven.

We enjoyed our meal so much and the restaurant was so convenient to the Shapura House that we returned to the Golden Peacock Restaurant for dinner on the next night.

While we didn’t eat there, the 3rd restaurant at the Shapura House is Rasa, which features an Indian Fine Dining menu along with a traditional song and dance show.

It’s located on the roof of the 3rd floor that’s an original part of the hotel and was right below the balcony/patio outside our 5th floor room. On a couple evenings after returning to the hotel from dinner we poured ourselves a Bombay Sapphire Gin & tonic and sat on the patio enjoying the show and watching the fireworks celebrating weddings all across the entire city.