Nite Out in Bombay!

Saturday night at Olive and we could be in any ultra-hip bar in London or New York. Dining on oysters and Arabian Sea salmon in the restaurant are bankers and designer-suited city brokers. Sipping mojitos and martinis by the sunken bar are cover models and A-list actresses. And standing under trees in the courtyard, dozens of hip young things talking fashion and film.

But we're nowhere near the western world. The DJ is spinning Hindi film theme tunes, half the diners are wearing turbans, and when you walk outside, past the valet parking, you could bump into a cow. Welcome to Bombay.

Two year ago, places like Olive didn't exist. Today, this is just one of a dozen spots on a stylish restaurant, bar and club scene that has made Bombay the sexiest, liveliest and most surreal city on the subcontinent.

Built on an island and linked to the mainland by a series of bridges, Bombay is the financial and industrial capital of India as well as the centre of the Hindi movie business - Bollywood is the biggest film industry in the world. An element of racy glamour has therefore always existed; just less obviously than it does today. This is not say that there is no poverty - 16 million people live in the city and the streets are full of child beggars. You walk into a place like Olive with a strange mixture of guilt and excitement.

Located in Bandra, a fashionable northern suburb that could be Bombay's Upper West Side, the interior of Olive is straight out of the pages of Wallpaper*. A gravel courtyard crunches underfoot and is lit up by lanterns hanging from overhead Champa trees. This gives way to a sunken marble bar inside, behind which smiling staff in olive-green tunics mix apple martinis and are quick to light your cigarettes. The open-plan restaurant is chic and minimalist, and the menu offers such dishes as bacon-wrapped roast chicken and Caspian Sea caviar.

Bizarrely, given the conservatism you expect in India, the outside toilets are unisex. But the laid-back atmosphere is part of the charm. One of the barmen points out Bollywood stars Twinkle Khanna and Karisma Kapoor, and I recognize cricketer Rohan Gavaskar dining at a quiet corner table with his wife. The exclusive Pali Hill part of Bandra is home to dozens of Bombay's millionaire sports stars, actors and directors.
Western style and pop culture is also far more accessible in India today than it was a few years ago. Rupert Murdoch's Star TV has brought in pop music and Fashion TV and the internet has allowed young Indians to download western dance music or to find out what's hot in fashion, food and music in the rest of the world. Mix this with Indian tastes and styles and it all adds up to a sexy and confident - if pretty exclusive - youth culture.

If Bandra is Bombay's Upper West Side, Colaba is the hip Lower East. We bundle into an Ambassador taxi and head south on a 40-minute drive past Hindu temples and grand Victorian mansions and round the half-moon curve of Marine Drive. A hot monsoon wind comes in off the Arabian Sea, rippling through the roadside palm trees.

After Olive, Athena in Colaba is the hottest new spot in town, a restaurant-club-bar with valet parking and a somewhat snooty door policy gently enforced by bow-tied bouncers. Athena has a stylish restaurant done in soft white and beige tones; two VIP lounge bars with low-slung sofas and cream lamps; and a dance floor in front of a large main bar where resident DJs spin western house tracks and speeded-up Hindi film theme tunes. To some, the star-spotting and VIP fawning in Athena can be off-putting. Not to mention the price of drinks: £6 for a vodka and tonic.

You may prefer Indigo, an award-winning restaurant-bar nearby. Part-owned by Malini Vachani, a young Bombay business woman, its Thai restaurant was rated one of the top 60 in the world by American Condé Nast Traveller and the upstairs cigar lounge with its leather sofas and indigo walls is more stylish then any cigar bar in Mayfair. More intriguing though is the crowd: the usual designer-clad trendies mixing happily with hip punks with dyed hair, gay couples and the odd transvestite.

In most Indian cities, late-night clubs are restricted to expensive western hotels, and Bombay has many of these. One of the most popular is 1900 in the five-star Taj Mahal Hotel, where you'll hear western pop and Hindi dance music and buy pricey pints of lager. But Bombay also has an alternative: Fire and Ice. Located in an old clothing mill in a remote industrial estate in the south-east, this is the most famous club in India. Inspired by venues like Fabric in London, four 20-something entrepreneurs, one the son of a diamond merchant, opened it two years ago.

A two-tier venue with a 32ft-high ceiling and a cylindrical bar, it accommodates 1,100 people and, on different nights, can get in teenage ravers, committed techno heads or millionaire stars and celebrities. The state-of- the-art laser show and sound system is as impressive as any I've seen, and a large screen above the dance floor relays footage of club scenes around the world. Tonight they're showing coverage of Berlin's Love Parade.

Unlike at other Bombay clubs, Fire and Ice flies over international guest DJs: Radio 1's Dave Pearce played earlier this year and Ministry of Sound played in September.

Perhaps, even I can bottle some of the surreal atmosphere. Down on the dance floor, I see two young kids spinning wildly to a hard house track, while at the bar a bouncer wearing what looks like military fatigues announces that India has won the Natwest Series, and the DJ churns out ‘Vande Mataram’ (Salute Thy MotherLand).

This just doesn't happen in London - never mind Brisbane.