Nachiyars & Mozaic

Mr P had gone to Hyderabad to attend the wedding of a colleague, so Mr VP and I had a perfect opportunity to visit Nachiyars in Ulsoor, which supposedly served some, well, weird food, like rabbit meat, quail meat, etc. Since Mr P is a vegetarian and wouldn't have much to graze on here, it seemed a perfect opportunity to for us to pig into the delights(?) this place had to offer.

This place isn't your quintessential restaurant where you go and expect to be treated with a certain level of regality. It's actually a quintessential hole-in-the-hole joint, complete with a narrow passage, creaky wooden tables and benches, banana leaves on the tables, etc. And once we settled in, Mr VP tells me he has a bad tummy. "Not exactly the best choice of restaurant in that case", I told him, and he grinned. What the heck, we were here, and it was time to get down to business.

Like I said, this wasn't a typical restaurant, and the waiter didn't quite understand the concept of starters and main course being brought to the table at different times, and so when we were going through the menu card, we decided to just order whatever we like, irrespective of whether it was a starter or main course. We ended up ordering a plate of mutton pepper fry (a little bit that I spooned onto my 'plate'),

a plate of prawn fry (on the left) with a dosa (in the background) for Mr VP,

a couple of plates quail fry [on the right in the pic above] (I've forgotten the local word used for it, something starting with K). The best part of the quail fry is that they give you an entire quail! That's right, what you see in the snap above to the right is an entire quail, divided into two portions: one part body and another part with the legs.

We also ordered a chicken kozumbhu,

and a chicken and crumbled paratha for me.

Since I wasn't quite sure about how 'safe' the food would be, I didn't want to risk having the water served here, so both Mr VP and I settled for bottled drinks.

After dinner, and a spicy one at that, I wanted ice cream or some kind of dessert to cool off, and we decided to head towards Taj Residency's coffee shop. On getting there, we realised that the coffee shop didn't have anything great (surprisingly), and so we were directed towards one of their restaurants, Café Mozaic. Tip: whenever headed to the restaurant of a 5 star hotel, don't forget that the food you plan to eat will be at 5 star rates.

Well, we went in, settled down, opened to menu and looked into the dessert section, and our eyes nearly popped out of their sockets (at least mine did) which was when it fully dawned on me, at almost 10 in the night where we were(dawned, night, get it?... never mind). But what the heck, there's always a first time for everything, and so we ordered what we wanted. I went for a bull's eye, which basically was chocolate truffle and chocolate something cake/pastry with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top and some fancy decoration that you see in the picture.

Mr VP had a choco trio, a chocolate triplicate with mousse in a pure chocolate cup, a brownie and chocolate ice cream.

I've eaten chocolate truffle before, and I've had some really good chocolate truffle before, but this one takes the cake :) It's the best chocolate truffle I've ever had and after eating it I didn't flinch even once when it came to paying for it (Rs 325 for each dessert). Yeah, it was a lot of money, but hey, I happened to step into a 5 star hotel, what could I expect. Expensive Sunday dinner, but luckily it didn't leave a bad taste in the mouth.

Nachiyars, Near Ulsoor lake, After Daily Bread, Ulsoor, Bangalore.