Tamarind restaurant is located near Deshapriya Park over erstwhile Lansdowne, now known as Sarat Bose Road. Due to it’s great location, the restaurant enjoys a great footfall and is ever busy. However, my experiences twice here have been too bad.
The location as I said is superb, the ambience and decor is quite nice, the waiters are courteous too. But the problem with Tamarind is its quality of food, which is very very poor.
The first time I went to dine in Tamarind with my office colleagues in 2010. We ordered Appam and Malabar Prawn. I did not like the taste of the Prawn dish. However, Appam was a first for me, and I had two. It tasted nice. But the coconut in Prawn dish and the ingredients of Appam had something foul play going on beneath. I had tremendous food poison and vomitted whole night. I had to take ORS next day and fast to come back to good health.
Since then Tamarind has been a horror for me and I generally wanted to avoid this place.
However, once in 2012, my parents insisted that we go dine here, since they have heard good reviews from relatives about their Biriyani. They told me to avoid Prawn dishes and I would be fine.
We ordered Biriyani, one Chettinad Biriyani, another Hyderabadi Biriyani. To our dismay, both the Biriyani tasted horrible. it was tangy, sour and not really catering up to taste. We had the expectation of South Indian Biriyani, and did not expect Kolkata or Lucknow Biriyani style, but the Biriyani they served us was inedible. I have had Andhra Biriyani in the past in Vizag and I liked it. But Tamarind’s Biriyani was just bad in taste. The heat too was too much.
We also ordered Chettinad Chicken, which was a disappointment too. Again, lot of Coconut, and probably coconut oil spoiling the entire dish.
Since then, i have never gone back to Tamarind. They are still in business and I think they are probably doing fine, but I would recommend fellow gourmets to better avoid this place.