What do you say about a meal which includes pork, prawns and chicken, and where the most memorable part was the Ice Tea. ‘So long Erich Segal’?
We stepped into TGIF for lunch on Friday (!) at Palladium. This is the new upmarket mall at Phoenix High Street, Mumbai.
We read about the ‘Jack’s Tower’ on the menu card – rack of pork in Jack Daniels, fried prawns, deep fried chicken – K and I looked at each other and said “groovy baby”.
We started with the lowest tower. A heap of deep fried chicken. The first bite had me smiling happily. Crunch crunch zing. The second bite made me stop in my tracks. I realised that I was being forced to break my ‘no desserts till Sunday’ resolution, which I made on Wednesday. This was sickeningly sweet.
I could imagine Gujaratis who like a punch of sweetness in their daals and vegetables liking this. Problem is that Gujaratis don’t eat meat. And we are not Gujaratis.
We moved to the shrimps next to give a break between the two brown dishes. The shrimps were large. Soft but not juicy. The batter was soggy. Luckily there was an underlying spiciness to it which was a relief after the saccharine sweetness of the chicken.
The prawns reminded me of characters such as Sadie Thompson in Somerset Maugham’s Oriental world. Painted Caucasian women of scandal. Their sell by date long gone. Trying to hold on to their youth in a flaccid and sagging world.
Not a patch on the prawns that I had had at TGIF Gurgaon earlier.
As K put it, “if only they spent as much on their chefs as they spent on their meats”.