Café Thulp

My guest at Dakhani Degh shall henceforth be referred to as WickedWitch - no, I"m not turning into a bad boy and neither are my senses leaving the small confines of my head, but that's precisely the name she used to describe herself - wicked witch of the feast, although it couldn't be any more diametrically opposite in description. Well, whatever.

So during lunch at DD, I tell her about my quest to find the city's best burgers, and she tells me that there is this new place about to open near her house in Koramangala called Café Thulp, and it's run by Gautham Krishnankutty of Tai Tai and Asia in a Box fame. And the bait she tossed at me was "You can't finish the burger that he serves". Me, not going to be able to finish a burger? Are you kidding me lady? Well, according to her, her healthy appetite prevented her from eating anything else.

So we make plans to visit the place as soon as it opens, and she calls me and we head to the place, me all geared up to tackle this beast of a burger, this upstart that claims it can beat me down. Once we got there, I immediately liked the aura exuded by the place - in a way, I'm a sucker for nice, bright colours, so I guess it helped in a way that the restaurant was brightly coloured, but that apart, it seemed nice.

A look at the menu actually didn't do me any good 'coz my eyes automatically homed in on the burger section as soon as the menu was placed before my eyes, and all I saw was 'Moos'. If you wondering what's that, well, that's the way the burgers are named... and I saw the biggest of them all, Moos your daddy, a beast containing a 12 ounce beef patty, and Gautham asked me "Would you like some bacon with that?". Do ants like sugar? Do women marry for money? I thought of a gazillion questions that had a one word answer, which matched mine in this case. I specifically asked not to be served the French fries along with the burger but asked them to retain the slaw served with the burger. I know now that I'll be able to finish the fries as well.

Moos your daddy

Another angle of moos your daddy

Ms WickedWitch had a sub, it's name I don't know. You can read a detailed post about Thulp here. We also ordered a Chef's special salad, which had a very nice dressing. To make up for the missing fries, I 'thulped' quite a bit of the salad, which is what gave me the confidence that the fries wouldn't prove to be an obstacle now.

We finished with dessert. I had a Picasso, and no points for guessing why the name. WickedWitch had a rum tart or something like that. And as I mentioned to her, I liked my Picasso better...which isn't saying that the dessert she had was bad - no, it was good, but mine was better!

Picasso

The burger I had here at Thulp will definetly make it to the best burgers list I'm compiling. The reasons I liked it were simple:

• Bun large enough to enclose the meat and 'stuff'
  
• Nicely toasted bun
• Bottom half of bun not too thin making it crumble
  
• Lettuce wasn't a large leaf making me feel like a cow (esp. while eating cow!)
• Onions in it weren't raw - they were caramelised
• Burger patty placed on the lower half of the bun without anything between it and the lower half of the bun

What's so special of the last point you may wonder? Well, a good burger has all the other stuff on top of the patty, and the patty shouldn't have anything between it and the lower half of the bun because if the burger had been made right, the juices from the meat need to be absorbed by the lower half of the bun. So full points for construction!

I guess a detailed review is in order, so I won't go into giving the usual gyaan about a place. Stay tuned!

Café Thulp, #998, 1^st Main, 1^st Block, Koramangala, Bangalore. Phone: 25487788