Tag Archives: Food

Lunch at Habanero

Habanero is the spanking new Tex Mex restaurant that has opened up on 12th Main Road, Indra Nagar.

It suddenly sprouted up new and shiny last month, and my colleagues and I were just waiting for an opportunity to make a visit, and now finally we did.

Habanero is ideally the place for drinking + food. They offer a tempting happy hours special on Indian booze between 12:00-10:00 pm. Unfortunately, ours was a working lunch, and we could not take up their offer. Next time though, I am definitely coming on my time to try their Sangria and Margherita pitchers.

We more than made up for the lack of alcohol though. We ate enough to feed an army.

Here are some photos:

This is an image taken from the Habanero website. We ordered the fajita with mixed vegetables

We were way too hungry to take photos and so I have taken these snaps from the Habanero website. On the left in the above photo is the dish I ordered – Vegetable Medley – which was grilled vegetables (yummy zucchini, broccoli, and mushrooms) served with Spanish rice, potatoes, and beans in a cutlet kind of thingie – extremely delicious and filling.

Yummy enchiladas

The beyond awesome desserts.

Mud pie

I died and went to heaven tasting the mud pie. It tasted less like a mud pie and more like a chocolate tart, but nevertheless it was delish and I have no complaints at all.

Tres leches cake

We also ordered the tres leches cake, a Mexican specialty. It tasted pretty good, kind of like an Angel cake. I enjoyed it too. But, I am a chocophile, and so the mud pie was the clear winner in this battle of the desserts (at least for me).

Overall, the place is awesome, and they have a variety of dishes. I am definitely bringing other friends along for our next drinks + dinner session. I plan on trying out more of the starter options they have. But definitely making room for the mud pie in the end

Btw, Habanero has two locations in Bangalore – one in Indra Nagar and one in Whitefield. You can make your choice based on the distance.

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Enjoyable Time Getting Berry’d Alive

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Last week, we went to Berry’d Alive – a dessert place in Indra Nagar that was simply a heavenly experience.

This time, I believe pictures speak louder than words and so am ditching the review. Here are two photos of the desserts that we ordered…

A Chocolate Caramel Tart and a Raspberry Coffee Yogurt in the Background

Didn’t realize the blueberry almond crumble is heart-shaped until I saw the photo I took

This is simply a must-go place for Bangaloreans with a taste for out-of the way sweet eats. Don’t come here expecting your regular vanilla ice creams and pineapple pastries. Come with an open mind and you will enjoy your desserts.

Address:

No. 1079,
12th Main Road,
HAL 2nd Stage,
Indiranagar,
Bangalore

The Island – A Restaurant Review

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The Island

Indra Nagar in Bangalore is chock-full of restaurants. Almost every other building houses some kind of eating joint or the other. And it’s not just about quantity, almost each restaurant in this area offers a unique and interesting ambience, menu, and overall dining experience.

To enliven a boring working Saturday, a couple of colleagues and I decided to try the new The Island resto-lounge that has opened in 80 Feet Road, Indra Nagar. Normally, I am a little apprehensive when the term resto-lounge or resto-bar is used to describe something – I always associate it with a closed, smoky, dark, and boozy ambience. But, I had seen The Island from outside and knew this place would be pretty different.

And it was. Different. In an awesome way.

As we walked in to the place, we could hear soothing, running water everywhere. And we immediately felt relaxed and ready to turn a dull boring day into an unexpected treat.

We picked some outside seating close to the fountain and got down to the serious business of deciding what to order. We ended up choosing the following…

Litchi Cooler

Grilled Vegetables

Quesadilla and a Mango Bloom on the top left corner

Chimichanga (image taken from the web as I forgot to take a photo)

The food was pretty delicious with the quesadilla being the star. It was yummy beyond words. The grilled vegetables was standard fare, but I loved it for the freshness of the veggies. The chimichanga (which I can only describe as an oblong cheese filled samosa) was tasty but extremely filling. It was just beyond our capacity. Strictly for cheese lovers or someone extremely ravenous.

After helping our friend finish her chimichanga (not very successfully), we just could not even get up from our seats. There were two hammocks placed nearby and they were just beckoning us to come and have a snooze.

But, alas…we had to go back to work and so we just managed to wobble our way outside to catch a rickshaw, get to office, and then slump into our chairs.

Two Awesome Restaurants in Indra Nagar at Two Completely Different Price Points

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We are supremely lucky to be living close to Indra Nagar in Bangalore, which is absolutely one of the hot spots for sophisticated eating choices at varying price points. This month, we visited 2 excellent restaurants that I am happy to recommend to anyone looking for eating places in Bangalore.

First up, is the reasonable eating joint we visited a couple of weeks back – Cream Centre.

Cream Centre

This is apparently a chain of vegetarian restaurants with franchisees already present in Mumbai, Pune, and Chennai. However, we did not know that and almost missed this little gem thinking it was a bakery (the name is seriously misleading).

But the food was awesome, with a varied menu to interest people with different types of palates. For the continental foodies (like me), there are the sizzlers, and the pastas. For the Indo-lover, there is channa batura, tawa paratha, Bambaiya ragda, and more. And for the junk food lover, they have the most awesome onion rings I have ever tasted .

We started off with the drinks. The iced tea was standard stuff, but my friend really enjoyed this awesome crushed ice, fruit mocktail. It was also so huge that we could all happily share .

Absolutely awesome drink, unfortunately I forgot the name

My friends ordered the sizzlers.

Paneer Shaslik Sizzler

I ordered the pasta in pasta, which is an innovative option of providing two types of pastas within one dish. Here is a photo:

A cheesy macaroni surrounded by spaghetti in a tomato-based sauce

I am a bit of a pasta purist, and so I can’t say I enjoyed this whole-heartedly, but still this is a dish that could appeal to others. I have to say that the food on the table looked identical to these pictures that I took off the Cream Center website, and I think that’s pretty impressive. Not too many dishes end up looking just like how they are advertised!

Another reason we loved our experience at this restaurant? The sweetie pie manager came to check how we enjoyed our food and even offered us a dessert on the house! We were really tempted to take him up on his offer, but alas! we were too stuffed already. If only he had come 10 mins earlier, we would have definitely taken him up on it .

All in all, it’s a great value for money fun dining place.

Now, onto the super-pricey restaurant, we visited last weekend – the 100 Feet boutique restaurant.

100 Feet restaurant on 100 Feet Road in Indra Nagar

Primarily a Mediterranean restaurant, this one ranks high on both the food and the ambience. This is an old house that is converted into a restaurant/shop. The atmosphere is relaxed, there is a wide range of cocktails, and the food and the service is excellent. We were a huge group ordering tons of stuff, and not one item was a disappointment. Even the folks who were not too fond of Mediterranean food cleaned their plates. And the desserts are to die for. I shared a tiramisu with my mom, and was really regretting not getting one just for myself alone. The snubnose polished off a massive Belgian chocolate mousse cake; the cheesecake was also a huge hit!

So, it’s a great place, but the prices are a little on the steep side. However, if you are not on a budget, or are content with just a couple of dishes, then this is the place for you. I unfortunately don’t have pictures to share, but trust me, this is a seriously awesome dining place!

In Which Post I Dissect an Egg

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The snubnose like most others I know has a couple of ~~guilty~~ pleasures when it comes to food. One of them is the Kinder joy chocolate egg.

The Kinder Joy Egg

These chocolate eggs have been available on supermarket aisles for ages now and I always used to wonder which poor sap would be so mad as to fork Rs.30 for one. Well, now I know – their target market is frazzled moms and dads of tantrum throwing toddlers.

For the past few months, we have been regularly procuring the egg for the snubnose during our grocery rounds. And noticed that this egg craze is not solely limited to my daughter. These eggs have been flying off the supermarket shelves.

The reason for that is fairly simple, and I will explain in detail through the use of pictures and words.

Once opened, the egg has two halves, one side contains the chocolate, the other side contains a surprise toy.

The two halves of the egg

A close-up of the toy (sorry for the extremely blurry pictures – blame my crappy camera with its broken focus)

The Surprise Toy

The snub nose first sets off carefully assembling the toy. Adult help is required because she finds the tiny parts a little difficult to put together.

Toys Assembled - A Little Something in Honor of the Winter Olympics

And then she proceeds to savor the egg.

Tucking in

A Happy Moment

This is rather a self-indulgent post from me and my daughter. I know that the snubnose’s current obsession with the Kinder joy egg will not last that long, and somehow I wanted to cherish these very sweet happy moments.

The snubnose is also always thrilled when she is featured on my blog, and so how could I not indulge her in this

Lunch at Serengeti

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Last weekend, we had a huge meet-up with friends to celebrate. The occasion was the birth of a baby girl for one of the guys.

Based on good recommendations, we decided to go to the Serengeti restaurant in Total Mall, Madiwala.

Our Plates

Set amidst a lush jungle ambience complete with sound effects and a life-size elephant, it transports you to a tropical rainforest environment (somewhat similar to Rainforest Cafe).

There is a huge elephant at the entrance with a mechanized trunk that moves when you enter. The elephant is followed by a cute bridge that leads you to the dining area. The waiters are all dressed in forest garb looking a bit like Shikhari Shambu. There are tons of animal dummies strewn all over the place, which provided a good distraction to all the kids. The ceiling is covered with artificial green leaves and trees. There are also some streams and some artificial rain.

Overall, the atmosphere was very good. A little on the dark side, which I did not like. The snubnose was also very uneasy at first, though she soon settled in and began to feel quite comfortable. I also did not like the damp smell that was prevalent because of the artificial rain and the streams.

Once we were seated, we opted for the fixed menu and settled in.

The fixed menu consists of soup, naan, one side dish, one dal, one pulav, and curd rice. Dessert was gulab jamun and ice creams.

The food was overall very good. The soup, the naan, and the dal were excellent. The gulab jamun sucked. We had ordered paneer tikka starters, which were extremely delicious. The snubnose polished off quite a few.

Doing whoo whoo to cool the soup

Can you see the empty plate?

I did feel that the price (Rs.300/- + tax) was a little bit steep, when there was not too much choice. However, that is mere quibbling.

Generally, we all enjoyed the meal, and lingered chatting and catching up for a long time. Most important, the kids had a blast

More photos below:

All smiles

The Three Musketeers

Btw, there were a few downers:

Serengeti is not a rain forest in Africa. It is actually a plain, so this restaurant is not very accurately named
North-Indian food, nothing remotely African
The yucky restrooms and the basement parking

If you can overcome these blah things, you will enjoy a good experience at Serengeti .

Guilty Pleasures…

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In this funny article in The Guardian, the reporter interviews Michelin award-winning chefs about their favorite guilty pleasure foods. The stuff that came out was quite surprising ranging from Burger King cheese burgers to Filet-o-fish from McDonald’s.

This is a fun article and actually quite reassuring to read. Reading the comments at the end of the article is even more fun, almost everyone has a few guilty pleasures.

Since, the article is now closed for commenting, I thought I would list my guilty pleasures here (in no particular order of preference, and not limited to food):

Ooty Chocolates (especially the mint flavor). Not only am I guilty of this, but I have spread the mania to dozens of co-workers by bringing boxes of the stuff to office to distribute
Baskin Robbins ice-cream – I don’t think there is a flavor they have that I don’t love
Subway subs and cookies – yumm!
Maggi noodles – the good ole Masala flavor
Stardust and Cine Blitz magazines – all the gossip, the salaciousness. Best way to enjoy a rainy afternoon!
Rereading Georgette Heyer, Agatha Christie, Enid Blyton, Victoria Holt novels-occasionally even a Mills n Boon
Random driving just for the sake of it – yes, even in Bangalore traffic, I just love it, and when I am speeding up on the Outer Ring Road, I sometimes like to pretend that I am an F1 driver

There, now I have unloaded … you tell me, what are your guilty pleasures in life?

New Eating Hangouts in Indra Nagar

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Gloria Jean's Lured in by the promise of a sample drink, we (hubby, myself, and snubnose) walked into the new Gloria Jean’s coffee outlet on 100 Feet Road in Indra Nagar.

I generally love coffee shops and I always like to hang out and chill with friends and family. The focus is less on eating and more on conversation and of course people-watching

So, once we walked in and settled ourselves down, we had a look at the menu, and decided on the following:

Chocolate croissant (for me and snubnose)
Veg puff (for Kalyan)

We also asked for the sample drink. The sample drink was a minuscule (and I mean almost microscopic) cup of Strawberry Chiller. We all washed it down in one gulp. It was extremely tasty and I would not have minded ordering it, but everyone is just recovering from a cold and I didn’t want to take any chances.

Our order arrived, and we all settled in to eat. The chocolate croissant was nicely warm and gooey. However, it had a faint eggy smell, which was slightly off-putting. Now, I know that croissants are made with eggs, but the really good ones don’t smell of it. The Coffee Day croissant is far superior. Kalyan found his puff okay.

The steward mentioned that there was a complimentary “Babycino”, which is available for kids under 5. I was totally floored by the concept (I have never heard of any special drink for children before), and I was very curious to see what the Babycino looked like. And, it was complimentary, so what the hell…

The Babycino turned out to be a combination of cream, cold milk, some colorful sprinkles (people with kids will know what sprinkles is, but it is very difficult to describe to others), and a small marshmallow stick.

It was filled to the brim and given in a small Espresso cup. Now, giving a toddler a cup filled with milk to the brim is just asking for trouble. So, I asked the steward to put it in a larger cup so that spillage is a little less. He refused, and said that the larger cups are “countable”, which means if there is any missing, they are asked to account for it.

Hmm…I ended up taking 2 small cups, dividing the drink into smaller quantities and giving it to her. Not very happy at all. I almost wished she had spilt the drink there, so that they would understand how dumb this policy is. However, I guess I should not blame them completely as this is the case with many outlets (Subway is another example). Really, businesses should start thinking about the customer a little bit more.

Anyway, while returning home, I was thrilled to see that “The Cream and Fudge Factory” has opened a branch in Indra Nagar. It is located just behind the Coffee Day on 100 Feet Road.

The main Koramangala outlet serves some amazing ice-creams, and I am thrilled to see that it is now located a lot closer to home.

Now, just waiting for mom to come visit…she really enjoys the pleasure of a good dessert…

Reached home and ended up having a bad stomach-ache. The croissant really did not agree with me at all

Fine Dining at Herbs & Spice

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I have been eating at Herbs and Spice in Indra Nagar since it opened years ago in a small bungalow off CMH and 100 Ft road. At that time, I really used to enjoy the small rustic-style, relaxed ambience, and the awesome food and desserts.

This time, when my mom came to visit, we decided to take her to the new, expanded restaurant that they have opened in 80 Feet Road.

The new place is also pretty gorgeous. It is built on a terrace and offers both open-roof and closed-roof seating. We chose the open-roof option (not really chose, as the place was packed and we had to just take what we could get). And sat down to enjoy and soak in the atmosphere (hoping that it would not rain).

And we sat, and sat, and sat. Probably, because the place was packed, we had to wait almost 15 mins for a waiter to come take our order.

And once we ordered, it was another very loooong wait. The snub nose started to get very restless and started flinging table napkins and cutlery around. When she threatened to start off with the plates, hubby very obligingly took her for a round (which mainly involved climbing up and down stairs). Finally, the food arrived …

We had ordered the following :

Spinach and cumin soup
Abissini with broccoli, olive oil, and chili peppers (abissini is a small shell-like pasta – very similar to the ones sold by Barilla and even Bambino)
Spaghetti with whole tiger prawns

The food was definitely worth the wait. The soup was pretty yummy, and I even managed to coax the snub nose into trying a few spoon fulls.

The abissini was accompanied by a salad, and was very tasty yet light. However, it seemed to be a little bit too much on the lighter side. Our fault, because me and my mom were sharing the pasta.

Note for next time: don’t think of sharing the food, as the portions are genuinely single portions.

K really enjoyed the spaghetti with tiger prawns. So overall, the dinner was a hit. We still felt a need for dessert, and would have preferred to have it in Herbs and Spice. However, because of the snub nose’s restlessness, we decided to make our way to Baskin Robbins where we all enjoyed delicious ice-creams.

Wah wahs : Great food, great ambience
Improvement areas : Quicker service

If interested, you can get more information about Herbs & Spice at : http://www.herbsandspice.in/

A Food Friendly Post

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I have been eating out a lot lately, thanks to a suddenly blooming social life…I seem to go through these in phases, there are weekends when all I do by means of recreation is curl up under the blanket with a lovely book, and occasional trips outside to the library or meet the in-laws. After a few weeks of this, I am ready to get back into the fray of things – catching up with friends and gossiping about others

Last weekend, I met up with all my ex-colleagues (from 3 companies back – amazing that we all still keep in touch !) at the spanking new Coffee Day Square in Kasturba Gandhi Road. This has got to be one of the better Coffee Day outlets in Bangalore. The space is humongous, comfortable, they also have a larger variety of stuff than the standard CCD outlet…single-origin coffees anyone ? this is the place to go to. The biggest plus of all, they have valet parking – the biggest boon for a coffee shop located bang in the heart of the city.

Cafe Coffee Day Square

After lingering over coffees and cake, we all made our way to Rajdhani – a Rajasthani / Gujarati restaurant serving thali meals. As usual, I did not enjoy the meal ( I am not partial to thalis), ate a couple of pooris and some veggies and unsuccessfully tried to feed something to the snub-nose; she did not show any interest either. In addition, the really looong wait for the food really put me off -this wait, even after we had booked a table !

Thali meal

However, everything is forgiven when the company is good, and we had such a nice time that we quite forgot everything and just gave ourselves up to joking and laughing.

Came back home and somehow managed to feed the snub-nose a giant bowl of papaya to make up for the lackluster dinner…a pleasant change from her normal food and tired, she fell fast asleep as soon as she hit the bed.

Next weekend, I meet up another batch of ex-colleagues from 2 companies back…and I am already looking forward to the massive dinner I know we are going to enjoy at Nanking.

Probably, the only positive thing about changing companies is the great people you meet and befriend along the way !