While I did a small rant about buffets in my last post, yes, buffets around the city are becoming a set of average food with a lot of variety with ability to eat more, rather than focus on quality. If I had known that the invite to Taj Clubhouse for the Karavalli food festival was a buffet, I would have skipped it. Most certainly!!! And then I would have regretted it! Forever. Granted, buffets are buffets even if it is at the Taj. But when some dishes are stunners, the buffet is more than worth it.

It all started off with the crab. With a nice nut cracker at our disposal, this crab cooked with spices and the shell intact was a stunner! A stunner by a long margin and the probably the second best crab I have had in Chennai, the first being the Stuffed Crab in Shell at Blue Diamond! I don't know what was so good in this crab. Fresh. Check. Flavour. Check. Spices. Check. Fantastic. Check. I could go on and on. For the first time, I had about 4-5 large pieces of crab. My fellow foodie had a similar number, but another foodie missed out. He dismissed that he likes only soft shell crabs. His loss! The vegetarians had a tough time looking at us tearing out crabs. No fork and knife for this. Downright dirty!!!! And so worth it.

I can finish my post here and the visit to this festival will still be worth it, but there was more. The fish in the starters was quite nice too. Then there was some mediocre chicken and more mediocre stuff like in all buffets. And between such dishes came more excellent ones!!!! The Chicken cooked in a coconut gravy. Stunner!!!! It was the perfect accomplice for the idiyappam and the parota. Three each. Same story. Don't know what was so good because I could not deconstruct the dish.  It was flavourful, mild in spice, not heavy on the stomach and like the crab had all the checks in my boxes.

And then more average stuff. Then another stunner. Kadalai Curry. It went well with parota, kerala rice and the neer dosa. My friend was raving about the fish gravy, but I gave it a miss. 3 parotas, 3 idiyappams, 5-6 crabs were enough to make any buffet worth it.

And then another stunner. S. StunnerS. The desserts. The same dessert that was in the Goan Food festival at Hyatt, but a notch better here. The bebinca and dodol, with ice cream. Both, like the rest of the meal, had a home cook touch to it and I had to really control myself from over eating. Already I had to roll to the car!!!!

Karavalli the iconic restaurant at Bangalore and serves food from the Goan, Mangalore and Kerala, essentially, coastal regions of South India!!!! The festival is on till the 27th of September!!!!! Nothing extra for this as its part of the buffet.

When it rains, it pours!! Yeah, this month sees a battalion of new launches and food festivals in Chennai. What started off with the Cuisines from the Nawabs has taken a detour to Goa, with new menu launches at On the rocks and the Citibank Restaurant Week's 2nd edition in Chennai, this month is a bang!!!!

So, when we say Goan food, we think of beaches, grilled fish, chips, mayo dips and booz! Right? Wrong, apparently. A few years back, a very nice Goan food fest at Residency gave me insights into Goan cuisine which was helmed by a home chef, but this time at Hyatt Regency's Spice Haat, they flew down their exec chef from their Goa Hyatt!!! So what's wrong with grilled fish, chips, mayo dips and booz? Everything!

"Those are the fancy beach foods that were born out of necessity due to lots of foreign tourists," he says. The real Goan cuisine is far from that. So, peri peri chicken has the peri peri chilly? Peri Peri unlikely! :-) "The names have stuck from the olden times, but we now rarely use the peri peri chilly itself, but a blend of spices to give a similar feel," feels the chef. The actual peri peri chilly is way too spicy, apparently!

While it is available as part of the buffet, me being a buffet-hater, preferred the thali. Though available only for dinner, the stuff that comes in the thali (except the dessert which you have to move your backside and walk to the buffet) has everything in the buffet that is part of this festival. Oh, except starters also, but that is served on your table.

And we had the peri peri chicken and a crispy fried squid to start off. Now that I know there was no peri peri chilly, my brains were confused, but not enough to stop me and the friends from gulping down a few prawns and squid. For the main course, I liked only two dishes, the Goan Chicken Green Curry, which I thought will taste similar to the Thai green curry, but they are like, poles apart. Extremely flavourful but completely different from the Thai Green curry.  I also liked the mushroom Xacuti, which is a spice blend of 12 different spices. Again, names stuck, but our chef here didn't mention much about the how the names originated.

While the main courses were a combination of hits and misses for me, the desserts were excellent. While we also had the only dessert that we (or at least I) know of, the Bebinca, which was excellent by the way, we also had what they call the Dodol and another one called Alle Belle. Now, this Dodol is exactly what my family makes calling it, 'Karupatti Halwa' or Black Jaggery Halwa! It was great to be able to get that taste after so long and I wonder how it made its way from Nagercoil to Goa (or vice versa). The Alle Belle was like a modern Goan dessert, with a stuffed pancake, rather crepe stuffed with coconut and nuts!

Since it is part of the buffet, its the same price as the buffet, but you can get the thali for about 200 bucks lesser. Look for more from the Restaurant Week when the post goes up on Monday!!!