In the course of my visits to restaurants with
various people, I have come to realize that the more extensive the menu, the
more nervous people get with decisions. Go to a south Indian restaurant and
people don't even want the menu. They know exactly which dosa they want with how much butter. Take them to a multi-cuisine
restaurant and they flip pages back and forth for a half hour before they go
like, "Get me bow pasta with white sauce and lots of cheese and a lemon
ice-tea, please!"
I, on the other hand, am rather picky about
what new stuff to try. I look out for weird combinations of common ingredients.
As a result none of my fellow guests will ever touch the menu; "tu kar na order!"
This Sunday, my cousins-in-law decided to have
a casual lunch at Ruby's (erstwhile Ruby Tuesday) and this Sunday, I resigned
as designated order-placer and left it unto my sisters and brothers-in-law to
do it. My youngest saala, Mayur,
asked for advice and i suggested very casually that the burgers are nice. On my
previous visit, I had loved them but little did I know that the name was not
the only thing that they had changed.
A random assortment of starters, from crispy
potatoes to nachos to chilly-cheese-toast, was ordered. The process of ordering
was quite interesting, though. A finger ran down the menu along the green dots
and the first three familiar dots were ordered like so, "iska, iska aur iska two plates each... Jaldi." Couldn't blame them…
everyone was quite hungry and the children were to be fed, too.
The nachos were interesting with three-grained
tortilla chips. What I really loved was the sour cream. It was fresh and light
and best of all, it had lemon zest well incorporated into it. The salsa and the
guacamole were both very nice but the chips were over-fried.
The crunchy/crispy potato was anything but
that… very disappointing! The kids, however, loved it because it had cheese and
a lot of tangy goodness to it.
Then for the mains came burgers (all in sundry)
and fajitas. Both were horrid. The tortilla roll for the fajita was cold and
chewy like naan and the veggies were
over seasoned. The saving grace was the sour cream and salsa, again. The
burger… Oh, where do I even begin? Ok, imagine a desert that has scanty cacti,
few sand lizards and scorpions and absolutely no rain since the dinosaurs went.
Now put it all in your mouth. One bite of the burger and the mouth was parched.
There was barely any mayo or dressing. A leaf of dry iceberg lettuce on a
half-heartedly cooked patty sandwiched between one-day-old buns that flaked...
What does that sound like? Well, it tasted even worse. It probably looked ten
times more presentable than the way it tasted. I was upset about having
suggested this, so much so that I downed it with ketchup. Eww!
The French fries, on the other end of the
spectrum, were a revelation. They were actually triple-fried, like they should
be: crunchy outside, soft inside, nice and salty, too. But if Batman sucks, Robin
can't do much better, can he?
There were practically no deserts and I was so
happy about it. Pay and leave, man! They should have changed the name from
RUBY'S to RUBBYSH!
Mayur then suggested deserts at “Coffee Bean
and Tea Leaf”, right above. I had heard of their Philly Cheese Cake being
awesome, so I ordered. Mayur went for a lava cake of sorts and Meghana called
for the pistachio, orange cake. All three were a big mistake. The cheese cake
was dry and beyond sweet. It warranted a few glasses of water with each
spoonful to keep me from bouncing off the walls. I quit half way. The pista-santra
cake was edible. Awesome play with textures but the flavours clashed badly. The
lava cake oozed as promised but the cake was dry and overcooked.
I realized that the day was going to be
unrelenting on my palette and stomach, so I skipped all food for the rest of
the day. I only had a bowl of dahi-chat
and a few spoons of daal-rice for
dinner at a friend's place to ward off the evil spirits of the culinary
underworld.
Moral of the nightmare, two actually:
1. Order your own dish. Even if it is bad, you
won't feel rotten about suggesting it to others.
2. If a restaurant changes its name, decor,
menu card, so much as its security guard, check if the chef and staff are the
same or not.
Oh well, everyday is a learning experience
right? Like where NOT to eat… XD
