Tag: chinese

Mystic in Bali – GK, New Delhi

MYSTIC IN BALI

Having seen tons of banners and being a hard core Chinese food fan, I decided to check out this place with my two friends. Considering its a second restaurant from those who run “Big Chill” (one of the best Italian joints in Delhi), this place already has a great reputation to back it up, but will it live up to its Italian brothers? Thats what i went to find out?

The decor as such is more Bhutanese than Chinese. Since I have been to Bhutan, i recognized a lot of the decor in terms of the masks, symbols and artwork has been inspired from there. One thing i felt which was lacking in the decor was that, they went a little overboard with it. A wall with just one central hanging with a bright background would have been great, but they decided to stuff it up with masks and other stuff, making the decor a bit stuffy.

Coming to the food, (the real purpose of this review) which was to my liking. The portions were good and the prices were those which you see in Big Chill, ranging from Rs.100-400. What we ordered were the King Prawns with noodles (a combo) and Sesame seed noodles with chicken and prawns. Both to my delight were quite good and had distinct flavours, not like the Indian Chinese, which tends to me more on the Indian side than the Chinese.

Overall, i think this restaurant is worth going to, if you do want to try out new and improved Chinese.

GupShup, Indira Nagar – Bangalore

This one calls itself the home for all kind of Bengali snacks. The place serves the usual raj kachori, tikki, papari chaat and also the very famous kolkata style chicken rolls. This place is located on 12th Main on top of the the bengali fine dining place, 6 Ballygunge Place, and something tells me that its owned by the same person.

On to the food, we ordered a plate of papari chaat, a plate of tikki chaat and chicken rolls. Yes, we were hungry and this was to be our dinner !

The food was passable enough that I won’t be coming here again. Come to think of it, how many places in Bangalore have I ticked off the list till now ! Well … both the chats basically had the same ingredients, which were the usual haldiraam daal namkeen, a little tamarind sauce and a little curd. In fact, the tikki chaat didn’t even have the tamarind curd in it. So, do you blame me for not recommending this place, not for the chaat atleast !

Now I’m a huge chicken rolls fan and the chef ( ! ) really could have redeemed himself if he had made those any better than the ones I’ve had in other parts of the city. But no. The parantha for the rolls was soft and not crispy enough and the chicken filling was quite tasteless. It really could do with a little sauce in it.

My verdict, don’t go there ! There are better places for chicken rolls in the city and as for chaat, forget it, Bangalore is not the place for it !

Chung Wah – Koramangala, Bangalore

This one is a part of a chain of chung-wah’s in the garden city. Quite a few people still swear by the original one on Residency Road but since I wasn’t in the mood all the way to residency road, I decided to check out the one in Koramangala instead. There are two chung wah’s in Koramangala and I went to the swankier looking one ;)

Since this is navratra time and wife is only eating veg these days, we ordered veg. I know veg food is not the best to judge a chinese restaurant by, but it’ll have to do this time.

I ordered a beer which wasn’t cold enough, a starter which was essentially a fried version of tinted sweet corn made to resemble dimsums of some kind, in short … not happening.

Coming to the main course, we ordered Dan Mein noodles which they call their speciality. It was ok, nothing great but spciy, which I liked. We also ordered a dish with gravy made of some kind of glass noodles and lots of vegetables.

There was nothing wrong with the food, but it wasn’t great. It was actually quite passable and *normal* as my wife commented. We paid around 450 bucks for the food and I’m not sure I’ll be visiting them again. On second thoughts, I might, if I’m interested in some *normal* Indian chinese food.