Birthday at Pepper Cafe

This post is more than a month overdue. It was the day I updated the description of the blog from "A 27 year old Bangalorean's ..." to "A 28 year old Bangalorean's ...". It was my birthday dinner at Pepper Cafe with a few of my closest friends. Special day, special people, special moment. Nothing much to write, most of the dishes were the same as what we had when I'd gone to review the place.

One fact worth mentioning is that Ms Quiche and Ms BakeAnything came with a gift - Ms BakeAnything had baked me a wonderful chocolate cake. I usually don't choke, but I did while writing this post :) Many thanks also to Rohan D'Souza (partner & chef at Pepper Cafe) for ensuring the food was top notch.

Chef's summer salad

Italian chicken bites with garlic scallion mayo

Fish rissoles

Crab, chilli and corn soup

Fried calamari with cocktail dip

Beetroot hummus

Grilled basa topped with Cajun spiced crab

Asparagus and artichoke fusili pasta

Chicken something with a pepper sauce

Lebanese lamb chops with tabouleh

Grilled tenderloin strips with vinegar salad and horseradish cream

5 spice marinated chicken breast with spicy Asian sauce

My budday cake

Benjarong

Last week I'd visited Benjarong with P and VP (for dinner). As usual, P happened to be working the weekend, and so VP and I had to wait up for him. So while waiting, and soaking in some of the, well, finer sights that walked in and out of the restaurant. So while waiting, we decided to order something to keep our palates occupied. I latched onto a Siam Sparkle, that was a drink having ginger and some Thai spices. It also had a cardamom pod and a slice of a red chili (bird's eye chili?). VP had a ginger and lemon cooler. Hands down, the Siam Sparkle won over the ginger lemon, which isn't saying the latter wasn't good, it's just that the former was better; way better.

Siam Sparkle

Ginger Lemon cooler

When it came to ordering something to nibble, VP suddenly said that he wouldn't be eating non-veg today! WTH! So much for sampling non-veg Thai food. I ordered a dish that had a star against its name (to indicate a signature dish) - chicken wrapped in pandan leaves. The chicken was soft, succulent, and well cooked and juicy. Although unwrapping the leaves was a bit messy, it was well worth it. VP took the liberty of ordering a veg dish (which could be had by P as well once he came). So he ordered a plate of broccoli cooked in an apricot sauce. It was a nice sweet-savoury mixture, and the crispy texture of the broccoli was very nice as well.

Broccoli in apricot sauce

Chicken wrapped in pandan leaves

Finally, P arrives, and immediately he and I ordered and split a veg Tom Kha Phak soup. It's one of the best I've had (the other being at Thulp). The lemongrass added the zing to the sweet taste of the coconut milk. Awesome.

Tom Kha Phak

We also ordered a plate of bean curd satay. It took me a bit to realise that bean curd was nothing but tofu. Tch tch, signs of aging I suppose. Oh what crap, what aging? I just liked the fancy way they'd mentioned it and so didn't realise it. The satay tasted good along with the spicy peanut sauce. I just wish tofu had a firmer texture - haven't gotten used to its ultra-soft texture.

Bean curd satay

As I mentioned earlier, there were quite a few sights to take in, enough to make our conversations drift in the general direction. Time for main course. We knew we didn't want to have too much, but the jungle fried rice and pineapple fried rice caught our eye. There was also a mushroom dish (button and woodear mushrooms) with water chestnuts in an apricot sauce.

Jungle fried rice with a mushroom dish

Thai pineapple fried rice

For dessert, P and VP has something consisting of coconut milk and water chestnuts (this meal had a lot of ingredients repeating). I settled for a coconut pumpkin custard, which was actually coconut ice cream with pumpkin custard. This was a superb! Being a Mangalorean, I'd love anything coconut, and so the ice cream was never going to be a problem. However, the pumpkin custard was a delightful surprise. I guess it must one of those things that either you straight away like, or don't. Me, I liked :)

Coconut ice cream with pumpkin custard

So here ended our meal at Benjarong, and I realised that none of the dishes we had (or for that matter that were on the menu) seemed to mention nam pla, or the Thai fish sauce, which is an integral part of Thai cooking. Now I know that not everyone who relishes meat would want authenticity as well, but when you're charging this kind of money, you'd have thought authenticity would be a given, almost taken for granted.

Food: Tasty.
$$$: On the higher side. Our bill, with a 5% service charge, came to a tickle over 2500.
Service:Decent
Verdict: Can visit if you're looking for tasty food, although I'm not sure about the authenticity (of course, I could be wrong).

Benjarong, #1/3, Ulsoor Road, Bangalore. Phone: 42066166

Rogue Elephant...redux

Actually, threedux (this is the third time I'm going there, and haven't written about second time). A bright, sunny afternoon, and Mr VP and I headed out to Rogue Elephant, and just as before, we learnt something new from the owner Anand there. Although we reached well past noon, he greeted us with a "Good morning!", and when Mr VP responded "Good Afternoon", he replied, "Oh, but it's never afternoon until the customer has eaten lunch!". I'll need to remember that line.

We started off with what we've almost always had, a lime juice, the fig salad and the just like crab meat, same as what we had when we went there the first time. However, for the main course, I decided to go veg and tried the Moroccon vegetable stew with cous cous.


Mr VP ordered the King fish medallions with a Putanesca sauce. And then, Anand gave us an instance of how when he was working at a hotel in London, and was manning the trolley while serving a roast chicken, he moved up to the table of the lady who had ordered it and began carving the chicken and asked her "Would the lady like some stuffing?". ROTFLOL. 'Whack', the head chef apparently slapped him across his head and said, "You idiot, you never ask a lady if she wants some stuffing!".


Once the main course was done, as usual Mr VP seemed full and so I decided to have the strawberry pannacotta for dessert. This tasted good, and since I love strawberries, this was doubly good.


A nice, fat belly, and back I headed to work, and back to planning the office team trip we had planned for (more about it in the other blog as soon as I get down from the high of that trip).

Rogue Elephant, 119, Ambara Complex, Annasamy Mudaliar Road, Ulsoor Lake, Adjacent to Foto Flash, Bangalore.

The Rogue Elephant

Mr P's away to the US on work, and so it was only Mr VP and I who set off to this place called The Rogue Elephant. I don't know why it's called that, and sadly, I couldn't ask the owner why it's called so. But tucked away behind no.119 next to FotoFlash near the Ulsoor lake is a quaint and quiet little place with just 6 tables and a whole lot of plants with a quintessential backyard look and feel, serving Italian/European cuisine. Thankfully there aren't too many who know of this place as yet and so Mr VP and I were able to get a table as soon as we walked in. The menu is little limited, but I can assure you that every item on it is awesome!

The owner was a nice gentleman who took our orders and explained about the dishes while taking the orders and while serving them. We started off with customary lime juices

and the soup of the day, which was a cream of tomato,

and it was perfect - not too thick, not too thin, and not too sweet. Along with it, we had the special salad of the day - a savoury pannacotta with caramelised figs in a balsamic vinaigrette reduction,

which was a first for me in terms of taste, and it was quite light yet delightful to taste. Also as part of the appetizers was a 'just like crab meat' with a garlic mayonnaise.

This was the first time I had even heard of this, and it's actually fish that is used to replicate crab meat, and just for the effect, a crab claw was added. The garlic mayo perfectly complimented the dish.

For the main course, we had another special, seer fish medallions in a mildly spicy Putanesca sauce

and a herb roasted chicken with a mild lemony sauce

along with mash and beans. Both the dishes were good and even at the end of the meal, I certainly didn't feel heavy, which usually is the case after you eat a north-Indian meal.

We finally rounded up lunch with a sweet peach pannacotta for dessert,

and I have to say that I think pannacotta is my new favourite in the dessert section. A point to note is that this place is open only from 12 to 5 and closes after that, so lunch is the only option here.

Wonderful location in the backyard, away from the traffic and noise, great food and atmosphere and conversations with friends...sigh.

Food: Very good.
$$$: Moderately expensive (around 400 or more per head)
Service: Decent, prompt
Verdict: A must visit if you love conti food.
Extra Info: Come to FotoFlash and look out for the Ambara board. Enter the compound, and go to the back of the building through the garden.

The Rogue Elephant, No 119, Annaswamy Mudaliar Rd, Ambara Complex, Ulsoor Lake, Aga Abbas Ali Road, Ulsoor, Bangalore

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.