Canara Café,
like all airport restaurants, is not a place where one goes to chill
out. Neither is it a place one takes the family out for a quiet dinner.
Airport
restaurants are not where you expect gourmet meals. They are eating places where you walk in
because there is a lot of time for your flight to take off, or because the
airline gave you a coupon or you are really hungry. Depending on the situation,
you dawdle over a cup of coffee or a glass of beer or gulp down a snack of
indifferent quality at a fancy price and move on. At many airport restaurants run by five star
hotel chains, the menu is generally a poor relative of those in the hotel,
while the prices are equally in the stratosphere.
Canara café differs from
other airport eateries in two aspects- first, the food, which is not great but
not too bad either, is very reasonably priced and second, the menu has some
entertainment value for those who can see the funny side of misspelling !
The crispy vegetable is
called “Kerspy vegetable” and is priced at some thing like thirty rupees.
The Chinese dishes offer
more scope for creative spelling. Wanton soup is listed as “wandan soup” and
goes for Rs. 35 or Rs. 40 depending on
if its laced with vegetables or chicken.
Szechwan is spelt as “Sazewan” when it refers to the chicken and
as “szeathwan” when it describes the fish.
Dragon chicken is “drigon”
chicken, while Chicken Kolahpuri appears as ‘chicken kalpuri” . One dish I
could not quite identify was listed as “moine chicken".
The prices of all the above as well as others like, chicken pallipalayam, and chicken chithamani range
between Rs 70 and Rs 80; reasonable by any means and very inexpensive by
airport standards.
I didn’t try any of these
delicacies; I have always been at this airport
at the time of day that warrants only a snack. I must say that the
chicken cutlets and the toasted sandwiches are not bad at all. The coffee and
tea are ok without ever becoming great.
The décor, if
you can call it that, is standard cafeteria.
What is important is that this is one airport restaurant where you can walk in, sit down and have a meal without significantly lightening your wallet.
Coffee Rs 10, tea Rs 10 , entertainment value of the menu, priceless !