Cheese Margherita (v). Crusty crispy Margherita pizza topped with tomatoe sauce, extra cheese stuffed in the crust & garnished with basil leaves. Cuisine: Italian Rating: 3.5/5 RC: @arbaz_siddique City: Bangalore (India) #feedyoursoull #feedfeed #foodbossindia #foodbeast #foodblogger #foodtalkindia #foodtalkbangalore #zomatoin #feedyoursoull #pizza #margherita #italian #italianfood #onesta #bangalorefoodies #bangalorefood #bangalorerestaurants #bangalorefoodiesclub #bangalorefoodie #the_hungry_forkvia Instagram

Continuing on the Ramzan street food series as part of Iftar options around, our next stop was Koramangala. No separate ground but on the footpath and the space next to the Hotel Empire in Koramangala, this is more polished in its looks.

Big differences though. The haleem wasn't made anywhere close by I guess, so there were only packed options. Tasted a couple and they weren't great by any means. Skipped the Pista house haleem as I can get the same thing in Chennai.

Everything else that we found in Bilal Mosque was available here with a lot more sweet options.

The round lamb stuffed paratha was fantastic! With a nice flaky paratha stuffed with yummy lamb, this was the best dish of the day. Price Rs. 100 for a nice big round paratha.

Everything else was comparatively expensive. Haleem was between Rs. 150 and Rs. 200 for a small bowl (around 300 ml).

The chicken kebabs were alright. Very similar to the previous place, but slightly more expensive. Lots of seafood options with even whole grilled and fried fish available for anywhere between Rs. 250 and Rs. 500. The whole fried crab was amazing to look at, but we skipped it.

There were lot more sweet options and the bread sweet at Rs. 30 a piece and the custard at Rs. 100 for two pieces were yummy.

My next stop is Chennai. I plan to hit ITC Grand Chola's Iftar and then start the restaurant Iftar journey and there is almost no street food Iftar in Chennai! And then the staple Haleem's in Chennai. Watch this space for more! 

Its been a while. Food streets during Ramzan in Chennai are nowhere close to their more illustrious cousins in Bangalore, Hyderabad and Delhi.

While Haleem hijacked the humble but awesome nombu kanji, the food scene hasn't taken over. In away, it feels like it is a blessing, because foods like this, dripping in reused oils, spicy and unhealthy written all over it, may not be.....not may not, but IS NOT, the best way to break your 14 hour fast. However its social and its fun and I may do this street thing maybe 2 or 3 times this whole month, not more! But hey, any street food for that matter is the same!

But leaving the unhealthy part of it aside, this is a boon for so many people who fast and don't have families to prepare stuff for them or for others to sample food from the culture.

You can say, 'Sour Grapes', since it is not so nice in Chennai. Whatever is the take!

First stop was the very well organised space near Jayadeva hospital, near the recently and beautifully built Bilal Mosque. It has car parking! Yes, you read that right! With over 50 stalls and a few of them yet to be occupied, this is Ramzan street food showcased well!

We started off with Haleem. Yummy. While I shouldn't be saying this, the haleem did not have bones. That is how it should be, but unfortunately a lot of haleem in Chennai is filled with bones, not crushed properly. It was smooth and the little gravy they add to the fried onions was super yum. Price was Rs. 80

We followed this with the evergreen Pathar-ka-Ghost, a flavourful lamb cooked over stone! It was fabulous. Served with two Sevia or Idiyappam or String hoppers (all three are the same, just called differently in different languages), it was super melt in the mouth. At Rs. 50, this was no-brainer. We had a second plate!

There were some disappointments. The mutton cutlets were bad.

Then the Reshmi kebab in Rumali roti was fantastic. Rs 140 for half a stick with the naan, this was juicy and yummy! This was followed by the Kheema Pav! Yum!

Being the first day, a lot places didn't have sweets, but the one place that had the Jamun Cake was killing it! Super yum!

Next post on the Hotel Empire based street food from Koramangala! 

If I had to choose one place that I look forward to eating in Bangalore, it will probably be Smoke House Deli. Located on the beautiful Indra Nagar 100 feet road with a black and white with red accents theme, this place has continental food that connects. This time around we were a big bunch and while it gives you the opportunity to taste a lot of dishes, it also means that not everybody will wait till you take photos. Some of them will make sure you don't. Keep them in mind when I get invited for a food festival next time! EVIL GRIN!

Three dishes stood out that night. One for being bad and two for being extremely good. The others were on par with Smoke House Deli's standards. We skipped starters and went straight into ordering a main course each.

The smoked chicken risotto, the first to arrive was the super hit. While it wasn't the perfect al-dente, it had supremely subtle flavours that was enjoyed by one and all! My dish, the chicken roulade penne was the other excellent dish. This one with a slightly, but nicely overpowering garlic with excellent red sauce and a fantastic chicken was a stand out. The other penne, a vegetarian version was supremely bad! The sauce was flavourless and the eater almost begged the rest of the table to help her finish it!!! The peri peri chicken along with the lamb shanks were the next best, but I got to eat only one spoon of them all!

When in Smoke House Deli, you need to leave space for dessert, even if that means skipping appetisers. We shared five desserts and each and every one of them was excellent. The chocolate tart with a tiny hint of peanut butter, creme brûlée, the awesome hazelnut bar, the panna cotta and cheesecake were all licked clean.

Being a big bunch, our bill was Rs. 6600 for 9 main courses and 5 dessert!!! This is like comfort continental food that is rarely off the mark!!! 

There are sometimes I wish I had my camera with me, but there are times when I am absolutely kicking myself for not taking an extra step and borrowing a cam for shooting food. Caperberry, tucked away inside Fava, inside UB city terrace, is one such place. Ranked the No. 1 restaurant in various ratings for a few years and taking a huge shot after Garry of Masterchef Australia fame visited, this has been on my wish list for quite sometime. Missing out on it in the last restaurant week when an affordable version is available, four of us landed on Sunday for lunch when we had nothing to do in Bangalore! A bill of Rs. 6500 for four did not leave us disappointed. If four people ordered four desserts without sharing, that is quite something!

So, we started off not so good, though. We saw two interesting soups and two of decided to split the Chicken, walnut with celery soup. This was the molecular gastronomy types, aka, minuscule portions of the solids with generous broth. The flavour did not make it, mainly because the chicken in a microscopic sausage form wasn't enough for the plate. Maybe if we didn't split the soup, the solids might have been enough for the broth.

But then on, the food was going from good to great! The first to arrive was the lamb shank with tiger prawns, called the Surf n Turf. While the surf n turf, in places like Miami denotes Beef with Lobsters, lamb and prawns were not a bad combination. The lamb was literally pull apart with fantastic flavours while the tiger prawns were kick ass!!! Thats the dish I was eyeing, but our friend took it and gladly for us, she shared! Then my dish came - beef cooked medium with asparagus, sauce, spinach and potato parcels. The beef was also pull apart really. It was cooked medium and just kept tearing off. Then my adventurous friend's rabbit! Whoa. Lovely would be an understatement, but the best dish was my temporarily-vegetarian-friend's saffron ravioli! Dishes like these show us that vegetarian food is not being done good justice in India and there is so much more to veggie food.

And then all four of us wanted dessert. Each. So we had our way and had one. Each. The minute I saw churros on the menu, I wanted it, but the waiter said that it was a deconstructed churros. I wanted it even more. And loved it! It was powdered and flat churros with the perfect flavour with lots of chocolate sauce to dip. The live tiramisu was even more awesome. Belgian chocolate with orange mousse was excellent, but the best dish again went to my temporarily-vegetarian friend, a dish whose name I forgot, but flavour will linger along forever!!!!

Yeah, the bill was Rs 6500 for all of us, but it was better than most 2k plus buffets available all around Chennai and Bangalore. I would rather have this than have unlimited mediocre food!!!!

Caperberry is on the terrace at UB City Mall, Bangalore, with access from the Fava Restaurant. 

My colleagues who travel to Bangalore more often that I do, have been bitten by the 'Eating Out' bug. Since they don't have a Bangalore Foodie blog, they have started eating out in new places and when I go to Bangalore, I am told what places to try! Ha. Yes. So this time, a couple of days before I went there, they had eaten at this place, they called ESCAPE and were dying to show off their find! So we landed at Indira Nagar 100 feet road and took a left somewhere and I was dragged into a small boutique hotel! As I learned later, the name was Bricklane Grill, a rooftop restaurant inside Escape Hotel.

I loved the outdoor setting! It takes you on a white holiday and with a swimming pool located right at the edge, the ambiance has been created with a lot of thought! Being a weeknight, it was rather empty when we went and so we got seated in a very comfortable couch right next to the swimming pool! They looked disappointed that we didn't order alcohol and we had a couple of hours to kill before taking our transport back to Chennai!

We started of with a very good, but slightly oily, chicken wrapped in spinach starter. This was followed by an excellent grilled chicken with a super smooth mash that we all loved! There was set meal with chicken tikka gravy and naans that was very average and had nothing to write home about. The pizza was very interesting on the board; a spicy chicken with sour cream, but while the chicken was very spicy, the cream wasn't very sour and so though we liked the pizza, it wasn't what we expected. We finished off with an excellent value for money dessert; a platter for Rs. 125. Apparently they had an offer running and we were lucky! Among the four, the lemon cheese cake was a kicker, followed by the chocolate with strawberry compote, while the tiramisu and the mousse cake were good too!

We paid Rs. 1730 for the three of us and were pretty satisfied with the meal. The ambiance here is the clear winner and though the food doesn't match the ambiance, it serves as a very good grill with a variety of food to choose from!

3.5/5

Bricklane Grill is located inside the Escape Spa Hotel at Indira Nagar, off the 100 feet road. 

What does Chinese cuisine mean to you? Manchurian? OK. What does Indian cuisine mean to you? Naan and Chapati or Idly and Dosa? Vada paav or Biriyani? Chettinadu chicken gravy or Butter chicken masala? Since China is a bigger country that India, how can there be one cuisine? However, Chinese cuisine is foreign to India (though it has been around long enough to be called Indian in most small restaurants which is essentially our Indo- Chinese), but Chinese cuisine itself has four major varieties. Yuatcha serves the Cantonese version of Chinese and is essentially a dim sum bar. No, there is no chicken manchurian.  Uniquely, the restaurant which was started in London has three outlets in India!!!

After a meeting in Bangalore and before taking our ride back to Chennai, the three of us decided to while away the two hours at 1MG Road and I remembered that Yuatcha came with a lot of recommendations! Being in the vicinity, I dragged the other two along and within no time we were seated and were discussing the menu. The irony is that one guy was a vegetarian that day and the other was on a diet! To experience the cuisine, they suggest that you go with two or three dim sums, a soup, a rice with sides and a dessert! Clearly they were in no mood for that, so after letting them order single dishes, I asked for the Yuatcha tasting menu which has the perfect balance to experience this restaurant and so I am going to be talking about that for the most part. After placing order, the manager of the restaurant showed us the open kitchen and explained the concept of Yuatcha.

I have had sweet corn soup in a lot of places, but this one was slightly yellow! And tasted the same, yet different. Very familiar flavours with one added flavour and I was not able to make out what it was. The soup bowl was dry within a few minutes. This was followed by a tasting selection of dim sums; a piece each of Chinese chive dumpling, chicken and prawn shui mai, golden fried chicken puff and a friend turnip cake. Each and every one of them were different and I specially liked the puff and the turnip cake which had three pieces, so the 'vegetarian' had that and the diet was forgotten for a brief moment for the other guy! Of the four, the chicken puff had the distinct Cantonese flavour which may not suite all tastes.

The main course then arrived with the egg fried rice which had the distinct Cantonese flavour and that went very well with the Spicy Ian Ching Chicken, the closest to Manchurian that you can expect, but still quite far away. The chicken was a hit and the diet was briefly forgotten again. There was a portion of bok choy, stir fried in Garlic sauce and since I personally love bok choy,  I loved this dish. The meal finished off with two scoops of a fantastic ice cream and, yes, diet was briefly forgotten again. His defence was that a piece of each is OK, but if he had the whole meal, diet would have gone for a toss and I fully agree. They should have a diet watcher version of this meal with just dim sum and dessert and I believe if people like the flavours, it will be a hit!

The other two guys ordered a portion of dim sum, which was the same chicken and prawn dim sum, but the noodle that the vegetarian ordered was fantastic and I don't remember the name!!! Beware, this is not your usual Chinese and the flavours are quite different and some dishes may take time to grow on you, but the restaurant, is brilliant. The setting is minimalistic and elegant and by the time we left, the restaurant was starting to get full.

The set meal is priced at Rs. 998 plus taxes and the whole meal including service charge, VAT and service tax was Rs. 2250 for the three of us. The man who started Yuatcha in London is now in charge of the Chine XO and Leela Palace, Chennai, so, I really need to take a look at this place!!!

Yuatcha is located on the 5th floor of the 1MG ROAD, mall!

We all know street food has its own unique flavours. The Mumbai Vada Pav, the street kebabs in Delhi, Golgappa in Kolkatta, even the Indian kebabs in the streets of New York, the Tacos in Mexico, Currywurst in Germany.....I could go on and on. They have flavour that can rarely be mimicked under any other setting. Rarely do sit-in-restaurants get these flavours right and there are many imitators and bad versions of the same even in other street joints.

Somehow, South India doesn't seem to have a street food scene. Or maybe I haven't encountered them anywhere yet and maybe they exist in some form that I am yet to unearth. Street foods in South India seem to be toned down versions or spicy versions of regular home foods. Or restaurant food. Think about it. Is there anything in Chennai that is Chennai street food? On the street, we get idly, dosa, paratha and gravies, north Indian imports like vada pav and pani puri, but are they really street food?Maybe the Besant Nagar beach appalam and the fried fish there are the only ones that come to my mind. Maybe the sandwich store outside alsa mall that serves sandwiches that can almost rival the Mumbai sandwiches, can be counted, but they are not unique to Chennai. I think the same problems exists in most of South India.

That is probably why when a particular dish street joint serves something so good, it is an eye catcher. This Om Sai Skanda place, located near the Sai Baba temple in Ulsoor, Bangalore served me mind blowing dosas. Two of us had a plain dosa, a masala dosa, three pieces of Thatu idly, two bondas and a vada. While the others were nice, the dosas definitely need a special mention. And I was not the only one, this place had a few 4.5 stars on Zomato!!!!

The thatu idly was large and nice, but this dosa. Well, it was thick, but crisp. Savoury, yet had a slight hint of sweet aftertaste. It had the perfect pancake look. Brown on one side. Uniformly brown with almost no patches. White on the other side. With a slight appam flavour, along with the very good set of chutneys and sambar, I walloped all this, knowing fully well that I had a dinner appointment! That the whole meal costed Rs. 130, didn't help matters to remind me of the dinner appointment.

I now found a similar place in Chennai and I will report back with a report soon!!!! But if you're in Bangalore, this place is worth a shot. If you like his dosas, you will love them, if you don't, then you won't lose much!!! 

So buffets sell. OK, big buffet priced reasonably sell. OK, if located near some IT company, they sell well. Take all of this and add discovery channel to the buffet and it is bound to take off extremely well. BBQ Nation thrived on treats and office lunch types. Take that and pump it with steroids and you can then imagine what Absolute BBQ is all about. Located a little away from the Eco Space building that houses more than handful of employees from over 10 corporates, Absolute BBQ has hit the sweet spot and throws something extra.

Essentially, you have the grills on the table with unlimited starters, a wish grill located at one end of the restaurant which has exotic meats like Emu, Rabbit, Octopus, Quail etc and a buffet at the other end. The starters were a mixed lot. I didn't like the lamb sheekh kebab as it was too dry, I didn't like the chicken grill, but the prawns, the fish and another chicken was quite nice. The cinnamon grilled pineapple was a nice addition that I took multiple helpings of. But the waiters noticed that we did not eat some of the starters, asked us what was wrong and brought new dishes out of the menu. That was an amazing gesture. So the lamb sheekh was replaced with a super juicy and super tasty and super soft lamb, while the chicken was replaced with chicken wings. As much as we wanted to say that we didn't like the chicken wings, we didn't because we feared they will bring another dish and force feed us. One short sweet bread was amazing and we had multiple helpings, even a little bit with the dhal makhani.

Next stop, the wish grill. For this you have to go to a common grill, albeit veg and non veg separate, choose your meat, choose your sauce, your style, add rice/noodles if you want and the guy will give you a token that you place on your table. Your choice of 'wish meat' is delivered to your table. All of us like the rabbit cooked in an Indian sauce, but for the rest, the taste was very similar and I don't think emu goes well with Indian spices. I didn't like it. My friend tried a completely different variation for the rabbit meat, ignoring the chef's advice and we ended up quite liking it.

The main buffet has 4 non veg gravies, a decent mutton biriyani, a choice of veg gravies, a very good dhal makhani and the usual salads. With an overdose of spices with the starters, we were gulping down curd to cool our protesting stomachs. Beyond the cold stone ice creams, which I enjoyed because I added a lot of crunch and cake to my ice creams, the desserts were nothing to speak of. 

If you go before 7 PM, you get a complimentary beer and Rs. 180 off on your final bill which is awesome. So we paid Rs. 720 nett, which is effectively the lunch price. That way you finish early and the next round of dinner reservations at 930 don't get affected much. Service was very personal and attentive and in fact a little too attentive if you like to have your space during dinner. 

A great start to this restaurant and only time can tell if they can sustain this!!!!