There is no sincerer love than the love of food. -George Bernard Shaw

While on a holiday in Bangkok a few years ago I had the opportunity to tase the most amazingly fragnant and delicious tom yam soup.I don’t know the exact ingredients that go in but it looked like a mess and tasted like heaven. A few things that went into the soup were mushrooms, lemon grass, prawns and lots of different Thai herbs and vegetables. Due to the lack of halal food we had to make do with drinking this alomost everyday. No complaints there.

So, this weekend we visited Benjarong, a Thai resataurant in Alwarpet. Yes, I know its been there for a long time but I never got to go.

The decor is very subtle with a lot of Thai influences. There was a sleeping Buddha here and a dragon there. Lots of whiny Thai music too. Near the entrance one chinky looking girl in a traditional kimono type dress was sitting on a little dais peeling and carving carrots.

For all the scene they put I thought the food would be bad. How wrong I was! Samma yummy it was! I wanted to take pictures but the glutton inside me didn’t want to wait. I did manage to overcome that and click three photos.

For starters we had tom yam soup. Super yummy it was. But thanks to all the kaaram, full nasal leakage only. We also had kimono wrapped prawns. Cute, I know. It tasted even better. The lamb something crispy was to die for! It was fried oh-so-gently with peppercorns and was crispy and soft at the same time.

Main course was rice noodles, Thai red curry and white rice. Thai cuisine is mainly know for the aromatic herbs and spices used. It is also known to incorporate the balance of the five fundamental tastes in each dish : kaaram, pulippu, inipu, upu and kasappu.

Benjarong amalgamates all this perfectly and forms one beautifully presented meal that is sure to leave your taste buds begging for more, although your stomach will burst from the excess food.

Location : TTK Road, Alwarpet, Chennai. It is right opposite the road that leads to Samco Malaysian restaurant. It is a one way road. Do not go in the opposite and direction and get stuck like my brother did.

When food is pretentious the stomach is forever empty.

This must have been the underlining factor on which Radisson runs ‘The Great Kebab Factory’. I’ve had some of the best kebabs in Dubai and Saudi and Radisson tries to over step the greatest kebabs in the world by claiming to have TGKF.

A couple of days back my brother decided that it was time we went to TGKF having heard a lot about it from friends. The format of the meal is like a buffet where you don’t have to get up. The food is brought to your place and it is an unlimited meal. Unfortunately, the food is brought piece by piece at such a slow pace. So they started us off with no starters or soup but with a salad that failed to hold our interest. It consisted of juliennes of an assortment of fruits and vegetables with ‘strawberry vinegar’ which was something like liquefied strawberry jam.

They have a total of around five to six kababs. The kebabs are so bland and awful that you would not want to relive the experience by having another. So the first kebab was this mutton seekh thing shaped like a cutlet and was incredibly soft. It was served with some paratha. Honestly, this was the only part of the whole course that tasted good. The next was chicken which had some fancy name. It tasted like nothing.
Literally. I’m sure even raw chicken will have some taste at least.

The funniest part was these waiters who were trained to give a vivid description of the food before placing it on the plate. So before he serves the chicken the dude will give one description on how the chicken is made, what its called, what to eat it with, etc, etc and all this is totally unnecessary ’cause I just want to eat the chicken. If I want to know how its made I would go to a cooking class!

The next kebab was a shady looking white one which again tasted like nothing. How do they manage to nullify the taste of food that way? Then came a fish. 1% of a fish to be precise. Now I know the food is all unlimited but it doesn’t mean they have to make the portions this small! The prawn kebab eerily, tasted like chicken. Oh, at least it tasted like something.

Eating all this messed with our appetites so we decided to skip the biriyani they offered and moved on to Indian breads. I asked for naan. It was just a tad bit bigger than those kebabs. The daal was terrible. There was one dark yellow daal and one light yellow daal and both left a weird after-taste in the mouth.
I hate weird after-tastes.

For dessert we had midget sized rasgullas, black burnt gulab jamun and some weird carrot halwa. The food at TGKF is bad, bad, bad dhaaba food at outrageous prices. I cannot believe a star hotel like Radisson makes such bad food, and for the price its such a rip off! I’ve had better kebabs for less than quarter of the price!

All that bad food played havoc on our stomachs the next day and my family, we have the strongest stomachs. Everything tasted like it had been frozen for days. Not one atom of the food was hot!

So basically what I’m trying to say is – “DO NOT GO THERE”.

The non-vegetarian unlimited meal for one person costs around Rs.1200.

Radisson is located on GST Road, just a few minutes from Anna International Airport.

Ok so I just got back from having dinner at Cedars. Now if you live in Chennai you might recall that the restaurant was previously situated in Gopalapuram but has now shifted to Nungambakkam. The last time I visited this one of a kind Lebanese cum Mediterranean restaurants was around 5 to 6 years back. And its weirdly comforting to see that although the location might have changed thay have maintained the exact same decor.

We started off with some tossed mushrooms. Oh FYI most of the names are unpronouncable and the odds are you wont remember the names once you’ve ordered it. Yeah, so the mushrooms excellently tossed with olive oil and some kind of herby thing were amazing. But were stupidly served with some toasted wheat bread. We then had some pesto chicken blah blah. Just like the name it tasted so blah. And it was green.
C’mon! Who serves green looking chicken?

I also had iced tea and it was the first time that iced tea tasted more of ice and did’nt have any trace of tea.

For the main course I had a really amazing Lebanese dish which consisted of saffron rice ( I doubt there was saffron in it. It just looked yellow ) and this super delicious gravy that had lamb, lentils and onions. We make a similar gravy in my native but we substitute the lentils for coconut milk and that makes the gravy extremely rich. But with the lentils it was the best lamb I had ever had. My brother had this weird beef meatball which I did’nt taste cause I don’t eat beef.

The dessert was the highlight of the entire meal. We had backlava and it was so rich that I could’nt eat more than one piece. But delicious nonetheless.

The superstar of the evening was this thick slab of bisuit or cake (I could’nt figure out what it was) layered and drizzled with thick chocolate. Oh Lord, the very thought of it makes my mouth water! Now if you ever go to Cedars it does’nt matter whether you eat anything else or not but please have this awesome chocolate thing!

PLEASE!

The price is a bit high but worth it for the different flavour that has’nt been experimented in Chennai. Cedars is one of the most expensive restaurants in the city. But the quantity is not proportional to the price. And that is very dissappointing. The service is also very poor. We had to keep asking the white shirt dude for the food so often that I felt like I was in my own house asking my mother for food.

The food is very different but might not suit all palates. But be prepared to burn a hole in your pocket.

Cedars is located at Wallace Garden road right off Nungambakkam high road, opposite to Wangs Kitchen and La Boulangerie.