I am back after a long break with yet another restaurant review. I was busy moving cities and while I did eat out a lot, I didn’t find the time to write or even visit Mouthshut.
I moved to Bangalore a couple of months ago and as usual began my tour of restaurants. (No, I don’t review restaurants for a living... I do have a different full time profession!)
I wanted to meet up with an old friend over dinner and asked around at the office about good restaurants close by. Someone recommended this place strongly. It was just down the road, right next to the newly opened Garuda Mall, and it was exactly the kind of place I’d love... they serve fusion food, you see. This place was Cosmo Village. I asked my friend to meet me at Garuda and we walked down to this place.
The decor is really what caught my eye. On the whole, the place looks like something straight out of Arabian Nights. The lighting is soft, the seating comfortable... but from up close, I also found it a little cheap. But what the heck... it is different!
I was told that the Kerala parathas with Thai Green Curry are simply out of this world. My friend and I had both spent days at Puru’s (the shack like restaurant outside Pondicherry University) and I don’t think better parathas are made anywhere else in this world. So we decided to eat non fusion Thai food. We ordered some soup and starters. These were quite good but the time it took for the food to get to our table was killing... based on just that, I’d strongly recommend this place if you were to take your significant other and not be bothered by waiters.
When we came to the main course, we had a different waiter. Someone who couldn’t speak English... well, he probably thought he could speak English, but I am not about to believe that! I kept asking him for a certain dish and he kept on insisting that we eat something else. He finally brought what he decided we ’’wanted to eat’’. We specifically asked for something not too spicy and something that we could eat without a gravy on the side. He brought us something that caused me to gulp down water... something that was terribly dry and way too hot for my palate! My friend ordered Moussaka which was just about OK.
Somehow, a few weeks later, I found myself visiting the same restaurant again with a group of friends. We sat down at a table and found that the air conditioner was leaking. Then we moved to a different table... this one a little too small to accommodate all of us, but we managed. We had some starters which were like cutlets around pieces of sugarcane. These was truly amazing. We also ordered some cheese filled chick pea balls... you’re better off not knowing about them. I ended up ordering Kerala parathas with Thai Green curry, hoping that this would be really good. I was in for a surprise. The parathas and curry were good, no doubt. But they were made with a lot more wheat flour than flour. (Some of you may argue about the health benefits, but if I had to worry about the health aspect, I’d eat at home... or at least choose my food more carefully). These parathas tasted nothing like the parathas I was expecting and I would much rather have eaten the curry with plain rice.
The place wasn’t crowded on both occasions and it is easy to figure out why. The portions are rather small (compared to the price one has to pay), the service dismal, and the price - simply outrageous!