Khyber - Give it a miss

Khyber was pretty empty for a Saturday night. Given the experience I had there, I'm not surprised now. We were made to wait for 5-10 minutes while the chaps prepared a dirty looking table. The white bedsheet they spread out on the table was not particularly clean.

The ambience was not spectacular either. When you can hear loud club music playing from Red Light next door you pretty much forget about the ambience. So, here we were eating overpriced Mughlai food, sitting amidst faux fountains and stone structures listening to "... I wanna fuck you, you already know!" Seriously!

The vegetarian starters were decent. We ordered Honey Mustard Paneer Tikka and Pudina Gobhi. The Virgin Colada Mocktail was particularly good. I ended up having two of them. (After my recent trip to Goa, I had promised myself to stay away from booze for the next fifteen days!) That's where the good part ended. The main course was atrocious. We ordered Paneer Korma and Murg Makhani - both bad. The Pudina Parathas were soaked in oil.

Four of us ended up footing a bill of three grand. And we had to remind the chap to bring us some saunf-cheeni. Khyber was pretty sad actually.

Tavaa (Bandra, Mumbai)

Why is it that the overwhelming urge to blog almost always occurs when the incident in question is a bad one? A vast majority of the blog posts out there are cribs about something or the other, and I'm no exception. So here I am, back from my year long hiatus on the Foodie For Life blog, with a crib about an over hyped restaurant called Tavaa in Bandra, Mumbai.

Tavaa is located at prime real estate in Bandra. It's just a stone's throw away from Toto's, Hawaiian Shack (the place has expanded and so have the prices!), and Just Around The Corner. In fact, Tavaa is just around the corner itself.

I admit that we chose a rather bad day to visit a "walk in" kind of restaurant. It was raining heavily, and the place was not very clean - understandably so. But the service was still alright. With the kind of prices, you couldn't expect anything better. I feel, the best indicator of any restaurants "priciness" (a priciness index, if you may) is the cost of one tandoori roti. The ones at Tavaa were a comfortable six rupees, and dal makhani was priced at about Rs 70. You get the idea.

From the looks of the place (which I presume would've been rather decent, had it not been for the downpour and the Sunday night rush), I had expected the menu to be rather exotic and fancy. I was in for a disappointment when all I could see on the vegetarian page was Paneer X and Paneer Y. Apart from Mumbai's regular Veg Kohlapuri, there was Paneer Kohliwada as well! What's next, a Chembur Chana and Dadar Dum Aloo?

I'm S-I-C-K of that typical red gravy that most of the veggies in Mumbai are served in. It's not the regular tomato based gravy you could expect in a butter chicken or a paneer butter masaala up in the North, but something different. But, it's in ALL the dishes in this city. And Tavaa was no different. Upon inquiring, the waiter categorically told us that all the gravy items were in red! Can you believe it? Even a mushroom matter masaala was in the sickening tomato based gravy! Aaargh! Left with no choice, we ordered a tavaa chicken roti and a tandoori paneer tikka for starters. The main course was a vegetarian affair consisting of a dal makhani, a mushroom matter masaala, and boondi raaita.

The only thing good was the tavaa chicken roti. It was a sparse matrix of mince chicken meat in egg covered with roti. The paneer tikka was marinated in the same bloody red gravy. The dal makhani was half done - it's supposed to be left overnight on simmering coals to cook and thicken - guess I was expecting too much :-). And the mushroom mutter masaala, as expected, tasted awful in that red gravy. To top it all off, even the boondi raaita was pathetic. I mean, I can make better raaita than that. Seriously! But that's a topic for another post.

So, even after having such a bad experience with the main course, we attempted the dessert. A dry fruit rabri and falooda kulfi. Both B-A-D. The rabri was sour and the kulfi was a molten mash-up of the remains of a kulfi.

It could be that we ended up ordering vegetarian at a primarily non-veg joint, but I can't believe someone can get something as basic as boondi raita wrong. And the desserts? Sour rabri?

Anyways, we spotted Razak Khan aka Makaudi aka Pappu Kanghi (I had a hard time fishing for his name and pics!) dining there. Quite a P3 joint this, eh? :-)