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| I thought Kerala was a part of India till I read this sign |
In case you feel that I over reacted about my move to Andheri East from Fort then this post will change your mind.
Remember Deluxe, Rahmaniya and Fountain Plaza, the honest Keralite joints at Fort that even a Bengali like me would feel so at home? Well the Malayali restaurant, Just Kerala, at Andheri East near the Mirador hotel is their polar opposite. We wasted Rs 360 (8 USD) each eating sub-standard food there and I am not going to waste too much time posting about it. The restaurant was suggested by a Malayali colleague, Sneha. Herself a gourmand and really interested in things to do with food. It was sad to see her wince through the meal.
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| Papads. The first to arrive after 20 minutes |
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| Sleepy, empty, Malayali channel on TV |
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| Sneha did seem a bit sheepish and the irony is that the restaurant didn’t live up to her love and knowledge of food. |
The only authentic part was the service. Both Kerala and Bengal are rumoured to be lazy sleepy states. Just Kerala was quite slothful. They took more than twenty minutes to get the food. One of our group had to leave early and they couldn’t get the food fast enough for her. We later packed some food for her. After eating it she decided to eat at the office cafeteria in the future. It’s not that they were crowded. In fact there were hardly any people there. And, as we found out later, nor was the food freshly prepared.
I ordered a beef chilli fry off the menu as recommended by folks on twitter. Sneha looked at it and politely said, ‘”this is not how beef chilli fry should be. This is over fried.” It resembled, and possibly tasted like, dehydrated goat droppings if you ask me.
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| Beef chilli |
The fish moilee didn’t like any that I had seen on TV. And there are many food programmes shot at Kerela. I thought it would be yellower. Sneha said that the look was fine. Then we both had the pomfret in the curry and winced. It was staler than the jokes in an average Akshay Kumar movie.
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| Certainly not fish moilee |
Then came the Chicken ‘tongue twister’. Sorry, chicken varatharachad. Sneha thought it was OK. I couldn’t taste anything as the gravy was a bit like a fetid Lake Placid sort of swamp. Our colleague whom we packed it for said that she could only taste the ‘masala’. And had heart burns after that.
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| Chicken in Lake Placid |
The porotas were not flaky enough. The appams too crisp and over powering. The vegetarians liked their thali. But as someone who has eaten quite a few meals at Deluxe, I can safely say that most of the stuff was too starchy. They had a semolina pudding or kheer at the end at the end of the thalis. A colleague of mine and I lapped them up in a desperate attempt to forget the meal. It was nice but North Indian. One could hardly taste any coconut flavour in it.
With restaurants like these one is better off cocooned in the office cafeteria.
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| The veg thali stuff. Come on, I have eaten at Deluxe |
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| Starchy stew |
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| Excessively crispy appams. Parathas which weren’t flaky |
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| A very North India kheer |
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| And thank God for it |
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| Photo credit: http://www.imdb.com/media/rm1693945856/tt0139414 |
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