Need A Break From Delhi? This Resort In Surajkund Makes It Surprisingly Easy

There was a time when my understanding of Chinese food began and ended somewhere between chilli chicken and hakka noodles. I suspect I was hardly alone. Travelling through Asia over the years complicated what had once seemed like a perfectly straightforward love affair. I began to understand how dramatically the food could change from one region to another, and how reductive that convenient catch-all, "Chinese food", really was. There was the quiet precision of Cantonese cooking, where a steamed fish could make an elaborate sauce seem unnecessary; the slow, numbing warmth of Sichuan pepper; dumplings whose translucent wrappers were as important as what they contained. I also realised that the chilli chicken of my childhood belonged to a different tradition altogether, one I remain quite happy to defend.

I was thinking about some of this over dinner at Golden Dragon at Taj Surajkund Resort & Spa, Delhi NCR. The restaurant may be new to North India, but its name comes with considerable history. Golden Dragon first opened at The Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai in 1973, its origins linked to Camellia Panjabi's encounters with regional Chinese cooking during her travels in Hong Kong. Chefs were brought to India from Hong Kong, and the restaurant became part of a changing conversation around Chinese food in the country. More than five decades later, that legacy has travelled north to Surajkund.

The timing made my own return to Taj Surajkund particularly interesting. I had come for a short break, expecting the familiar pleasures of a resort close to Delhi: a comfortable room, long meals, a spa treatment and the luxury of having nowhere particularly urgent to be. What I found was a property that works best when you stop expecting it to compensate for its proximity to the city and appreciate that proximity instead.

A Change Of Pace, Without Going Very Far

Staycations have always presented me with a small contradiction. Part of the pleasure of travel is the act of leaving, but anyone who has spent a Friday evening crawling out of Delhi knows that the journey can consume an unreasonable amount of the holiday you were trying to have.

Surajkund removes much of that effort. The resort sits at the foothills of the Aravallis, within Delhi NCR, which means you can arrive without turning the journey into an expedition. Its location is practical rather than exotic, and the hotel is better understood on those terms.

Once inside, the property is largely oriented towards its own courtyards, terraces, landscaped spaces and pool. The architecture retains an earthy character appropriate to the Aravalli setting, while the interiors have been refreshed with a more contemporary vocabulary. It is a sizeable resort, and initially there is a fair amount to take in, but after a few walks between the rooms, restaurants and spa, its internal rhythm becomes easy to understand.

My room came with something I value disproportionately in a hotel: a private terrace. A balcony can sometimes feel like an architectural afterthought, just large enough for two chairs nobody actually sits on. The terrace here felt like an extension of the room, and I found myself using it during those otherwise forgettable intervals between plans. Morning coffee tasted better outside; an idle half-hour before dinner became an excuse to sit there rather than switch on the television.

Inside, the room continued the resort's understated palette, with warm wooden flooring, contemporary furnishings and enough space for a proper seating area. The Grand Luxury Rooms measure 40 square metres, but the terrace changes the experience of that footprint considerably. More importantly, the room was comfortable enough that returning to it between meals and treatments never felt like waiting for the next item on an itinerary.

That distinction matters at a resort. A hotel room can be somewhere you sleep; on a short weekend away, it needs to be somewhere you are happy doing absolutely nothing.

The Restaurants Set The Rhythm

Food inevitably begins to organise my days whenever I stay at a resort. Breakfast determines when I wake up, lunch interrupts whatever virtuous plans I had made for the afternoon, and by early evening the conversation has usually moved on to where we are eating dinner.

Vista handles much of that everyday rhythm at Taj Surajkund. The all-day restaurant serves Indian and international cuisine, with indoor seating and an alfresco section overlooking the courtyards. I found it particularly pleasant at breakfast, when the restaurant has the informal bustle peculiar to resort mornings: families arriving at different stages of readiness, tables accumulating coffee cups and half-read newspapers, and diners making optimistic first trips to the buffet before returning with plates that suggest restraint has been abandoned.

The Promenade Lounge is quieter, positioned by the courtyard, and suited to the hours when you want coffee or a conversation without committing to another meal. Easy Bar, meanwhile, offers a natural transition into the evening, with cocktails, spirits, and wines in a more relaxed setting. Neither needs to become a destination in its own right for the resort to work; their usefulness lies in giving different parts of the day somewhere to happen.
Golden Dragon is another matter.

A 1973 Mumbai Restaurant Finds A New Address

Walking into Golden Dragon in the evening, the first thing I noticed was the ceiling. Bathed in warm gold light and punctuated by large inverted lanterns, it gives the restaurant a theatrical quality without overwhelming the room below. Dark geometric screens divide the dining area, deep green banquettes soften the palette, and blue-and-white porcelain introduces a more traditional reference without allowing the design to lapse into the red-and-gold shorthand that has defined far too many Chinese restaurants.

It is polished, certainly, but not excessively formal, which suits the way I prefer to eat Chinese food: with several dishes in the middle of the table and very little respect for whose plate is whose.

Golden Dragon's menu primarily features Cantonese and Sichuan dishes. It is extensive, beginning with soups before moving through dim sum, bao, seafood, meat, poultry, vegetables, rice, and noodles. That breadth is worth mentioning because it allows the kitchen to move between two rather different registers: from Cantonese preparations, where freshness and technique do most of the work, to the more assertive chili, pepper, and aromatics associated with Sichuan cooking.

The dim sum section is an obvious place to begin. Prawn har gao, steamed chicken siu mai, and water-poached dumplings sit alongside more unusual options such as flaky crab claw dumplings and flaky radish dumplings. Har gao is one of those dishes I tend to judge more severely than is probably reasonable. There is nowhere for poor technique to hide: the wrapper needs enough delicacy to remain translucent but enough structure to survive the chopsticks, while the prawn inside should retain its texture.

Further into the menu are scallops with soy, chili, and ginger; soft-shell crab with pepper salt; wok-tossed calamari; sweet and spicy braised pork spare ribs; and the restaurant's Song of the Dragon Chicken. The main courses include steamed sea bass finished with ginger, chili, spring onion and soya, twice-cooked pork belly, Kung Pao chicken, Mala tofu and Beijing duck served with pancakes, cucumber, scallions and sweet bean sauce.

What interests me more than sheer variety, however, is how a restaurant with this much history handles the burden of familiarity. Golden Dragon is not a new restaurant concept devised for Surajkund. It arrives carrying more than 50 years of associations from Mumbai, including generations of diners who already have an idea of what Golden Dragon should taste like.

The Surajkund kitchen has a useful connection to that lineage through Chef Tong Sing Wah from Hong Kong, who works alongside Executive Chef Anuj Mathur. The menu, too, retains dishes with an established association with the restaurant. Golden Dragon's Famous Three Flavors Noodle is perhaps the most conspicuous example. When a restaurant puts its own name and the word "famous" beside a plate of noodles, it is difficult for a food writer not to become curious.

There are contemporary touches across the menu as well. Edamame and truffle oil appear in a dumpling; mushroom and truffle turn up again in sticky rice. I am personally reaching the point where truffle oil appearing unexpectedly on Asian menus inspires more caution than excitement, but the larger menu is broad enough that diners can choose how traditional or contemporary they want their meal to be.

That, to me, is a more useful measure of Golden Dragon than nostalgia alone. Its history gives the restaurant context, but ultimately, dinner still has to work in 2026.

Slowing Things Down

After a long lunch and an even longer dinner the previous evening, an afternoon at J Wellness Circle felt well timed. Spread across two levels, the spa draws from Indian wellness traditions, with Ayurveda-inspired therapies, massages, yoga, and meditation.

Inside, everything seems to soften a little: the light, the voices, even the impulse to check your phone. I settled in for a massage, and somewhere between the warm oil, steady pressure, and quiet of the treatment room, I stopped keeping track of time.

I emerged in that wonderfully languid post-spa state where doing absolutely nothing feels like a perfectly legitimate plan. For a weekend this close to Delhi, that feeling of having nowhere else to be was perhaps the escape I needed most.

When Distance Stops Mattering

By the time I was packing to leave, I had stopped wondering whether Surajkund felt sufficiently removed from Delhi. Perhaps that was the wrong measure to begin with. Years of traveling have conditioned me to associate a break with distance, when sometimes a change of pace is enough.

This one came without an airport, a boarding pass, or hours on the highway. There was, however, plenty of Chinese food involved, and I was perfectly happy with the trade.