Monday, November 3, 2014

Have Fun Eating the Poached Salmon at Ikea Singapore

Like hunger, physical love is a necessity. But man’s appetite for amour is never so regular or sustained as his appetite for the delights of the table.
Honore de Balzac

And so, in the commendable spirit espoused by Balzac, we go to the Ikea Restaurant at Alexandria Road.

It’s the poached salmon that I'd been eyeing, that yummy looking dish with the yellow coloured sauce. Costs 8 SD which is great for the value. The cafe closes at 10 pm, but on a busy day I'm scared they might run out of the dish I crave - so I reach early in the evening.
The restaurant itself has a vibrant buzz and there’s heavy movement of men, women, children and food. 

You pick up your tray, go along swiftly moving queue – grab a salad or dessert if you want and then in the cafeteria style counter ask for the poached salmon – a fat portion served with boiled veggies and boiled potatoes. I wait for him to pour a ladle of the yellow sauce – it’s 'chives sauce' according to the IKEA website, and it’s light and just the right thickness - over the salmon before rushing to the payment counter and over to our table which we had blocked by keeping my knapsack.

It’s glorious, the dish. Fresh, juicy and pink on the inside, it’s a complete meal of protein, carbs and omega 3.
Other attractions – the mushroom soup and the black coffee are also great. And then the atmosphere - there’s a vibrancy that so encourages philosophical discussions, only you must raise your voice to hear yourself.

What’s lacking? Oh, the washroom – it’s always wet, and inspite of giving repeated feedback, doesn’t match up to what you'd expect of the hygiene levels in either Singapore or Sweden.
Bottom Line - Go and eat at the Ikea cafe. Period.

Thursday, October 30, 2014

A Ghost at Colonel Kababz

Under an ancient peepul tree at one edge of the raucous Defence Colony market. That’s where I’ve eaten the juiciest, tenderest chicken tikka. Outside of GymkhanaClub, that is.
Saliva inducing steam trails behind the waiter as he hurries towards me - holding the plate of tikka at shoulder height. It holds a large portion – 10 hot pieces straight out of the tandoor. And on a late winter evening this makes for a great meal.
You stand around a small round waist high metal table that’s almost as gnarled and battered as the tree itself; and you hit elbows with a tiny shack hawking paan and cigarette and gutka; and you sink your teeth into the succulent, yielding flesh.
The chill in the air bites hard. And after every mouthful you can’t but glance over your shoulder just in case a ghostly spirit, tempted by the luscious chicken piece in your hand, decides to pop out of the thick, leafy branches above.
The tikkas are delectable, fresh and sensational. The keema kulcha is crisp outside and soft inside. As it should be. Crunchy, yet dissolving effortlessly in the mouth.
Yes, the cooks here know their stuff. It’s an ancient art and they have mastered it, I can declare.
However, just because it’s an outdoor, takeaway kind of a place don’t think it’s cheap. Prices match those at any upmarket dine-in restaurant. But it’s worth every hundred rupee note. Every slurpy tikka.
Col Kababz at Defence Colony market has been around for decades; and the way it’s cooking, is likely to be there for a few more. Go there and savour the tikkas.

But watch out for the ghosts!

Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Prego - The Spark is Missing

Prego @ Westin Gurgaon – it has an open, airy feel and the photo station at the entrance is a startlingly sticky attraction. We record our presence in it for posterity and the waiter guides us to our table. 'What type of pasta would you like?' he asks. 'And the sauce – white or red?'
Sigh. I might as well be in a farmhouse or a marriage hall, standing - plate in hand - at a ‘live’ pasta counter during a rich Delhiite’s shaadi.
After MexicanSouth IndianContinental, we had decided to go for Italian. And I’d thought a specialist Italian restaurant would get me a greater depth of Italian food. But perhaps we’ve reduced Italian cuisine – with its ancient lineage, proud history and multifarious influences – into an oversimplified khaana. Just the way we’ve downgraded Chinese cuisine to chow mien, chopsuey, fried rice, and of course that most non Chinese of Chinese food dishes – the Manchurian. We settle for a spaghetti and a risotto – veg. Both dishes were quite pedestrian. Why did we have to come here all the way from Delhi for this? But the pizza – pesto and chicken – made up for the lack of pizzaz in the other dishes.
I would have preferred to bask in an Italian style atmosphere. But Prego has a contemporary, cosmopolitan decor – glass, chrome, lighting, a vast display of wine bottles, an open kitchen. It could be any fine dining restaurant in any urban upmarket location in any country. I guess, just as all rooms across hotel chains have started looking like clones of each other, the same fate is likely to befall the dining spaces in hotels. If you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all.
Prego is competent and efficient in all aspects – yet the impact of the whole is smaller than the sum of the parts. The ultimate experience is ordinary.
Whether you're going in for Italian for the first time or are an aficionado - in either case you could do well to look at other options.
It’s a positioning issue for Prego I feel. It has the basics but it needs to dig deep and find a USP that will make it stand out and be counted.

It needs a spark.

Saturday, September 13, 2014

Why the ageless Aka Saka @ Defence Colony, Delhi thrives

What makes for its longevity of a business, more specifically a restaurant? How many restaurants have are still going strong after five decades?

Coming in to Delhi after ages, it was with a sense of shock that we stumbled into Aka Saka. Surrounded by cafes, lounge bars, multi-cuisine restaurants, specialty restaurants, Udipi style restaurants, fast food joints, coffee shops, delis and take away dhabas, it’s still holding ground fairly well.

Other eateries come and go, but Aka Saka @ Defence Colony Market, New Delhi - like the pole star - has been running in the same premises for as long as one can remember. It has successfully catered to the changing taste of multiple generations by not changing! It used to be a favourite of IITians, maybe it still is, I don’t know.

While the less fortunate ones had to make do with bun omlet and chai at the dhaba outside the boundary wall of the campus, those with a bit of money, a motorcycle and a girlfriend, would head out of Hauz Khas and make a beeline for Aka Saka. There were no malls, no signature restaurants, no multiplexes, no cable, no internet, no mobile telephony in those days. Just the simple pleasure of feeling the bitter winter wind against your face as you rode – helmetless – on your Yezdi or Rajdoot or Royal Enfield.

As I said, if you had a two wheeler and good company, you’d head for restaurants like Aka Saka. It served what at that time we called good Chinese fare but was, as we discovered in retrospect, after becoming wiser with the ways of the world, good Indian Chinese fare.

We went there to dine on nostalgia and also get a glimpse of what we may have missed in those far off student days. Well for one, it serves, I discovered, hearty fare. Chopsuey, Chow Mein, all the things in garlic sauce, Manchurian, Talu Mein soup... you know what I mean. It has no exotic stuff, no pretentious dishes, and no Pan Asian ambitions. The portions are huge and a one by two Talu Mein soup is a full meal. It was actually two full bowls of soup. And of course it was tasty. As it must have been all those years ago.  Stooped, middle aged waiters serve you and the decor is quite late twentieth century. But it manages to compete quite well with all the upstarts that abound. The other tables were occupied by – what else – young couples.

What’s the secret of its longevity I wonder? Perhaps its it's unpretentiousness; or the great value for money proposition: it serves good quality, good portions of Indian Chinese at reasonable prices.
And it’s quite open and unabashed about itself. We enjoyed the meal.

So if you want to:  
  • Eat decent Indian Chinese,
  • Enjoy large portions without going bankrupt, 
  • Understand what makes a restaurant last for ever, 


then you must go to Aka Saka @ Defence Colony Market, Delhi.

Friday, September 12, 2014

Slurping at Murugan's Singapore

Like hunger, physical love is a necessity. But man’s appetite for amour is never so regular or sustained as his appetite for the delights of the table.
Honore de Balzac
The place: Murugan idly shop on Syed Alwi Road, just opposite Mustafa in Little India is a great place for wholesome South Indian tiffin cuisine. A world apart in atmosphere and cuisine when compared to an eatery like the Ikea cafe, Murugan's menu is limited.
The menu: Go here for dosa, idly, vada, uttapam, and curd rice, tamarind rice, lemon rice, tomato rice, sambar rice, apart from the wonderful filter coffee of course.
The insides: It’s clean – Grade A. The food’s consistently good, and we’ve become regular customers.With hardly ten covers, it’s a cosy place. 

What we ate: The masalas dosa was fresh, crisp, very long (!) and not greasy. Served with sambar (home style. I gave it ****) and four types of chutney it was yumilicious. The mini meal with curd rice, sambar rice and tomato rice served with kachumber (onion/curd mix) and aloo sabzi and accompanied by dessert was more than a meal for one.
And what value - dosa and mini meal for 12 SD! 

Interesting aspect: At lunch time there's at least one person on tour from India digging into the food. The conversation with the host is a formality, for the hero of the moment is the dosa followed closely by the smart phone.

What’s disappointing: The filter coffee was served in disposable plastic glasses - sacrilege of the highest order.