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Monday, November 1, 2010

Indiaas Vegetarisch Restaurant

It's over six months since I ate authentic Indian food at a restaurant. After moving to Eindhoven, I've had to depend on my own culinary skills every time I craved for some Indian food.
I asked other Indians living in Eindhoven about the few Indian restaurants we have in our city.
"Bland, absolutely inedible food!" , "Really small servings" , "Naan the size of a sev puri!!!" , "Names of dishes you've never heard of before!"
 The complaints were endless!!
 After lending my ear to a dozen such grievances I  decided that the Indian restaurants in the city were definitely not worth visiting.  My resolve didn't last too long though. A few months ago, Sri Ganesh, an 'Indiaas Vegetarisch Restaurant'  opened very close to home. We avoided it for a few months. A few people who visited it even recommended it. "It's comparatively inexpensive" , "Decent South Indian food" , "Value for money!"  Still, we weren't tempted.
Then one day as we paused outside the restaurant on one of our post-dinner walks, the owner smiled graciously and handing us the restaurant menu, invited us to come try the food there some time.
We walked home, flopped on our sofa and started browsing through the menu card. It was unbelievable!! We loved it!! As we looked at each item on the menu we were both in splits. Puri Paji, Peace Pulavu, Gula Jam, Lassy, Chuseum (what-the-hell-is that), etc the menu read!!!
Curiosity got the better of us and one weekend we stopped by to give Sri Ganesh a chance. We were disappointed. Barring the very entertaining menu card nothing much was exciting at the restaurant. The dosa was thicker than an uttapam or even a thick pizza base, the chutney was chalky and tasteless, the sambaar was like varan. The medu vada ( we were told there would be two pieces and we didn't think they meant that literally!!) was cut into half....horizontally!! And the medu vada didn't even have a hole in the center!!The sambaar was thick and dry.
We hated the food but I must confess that we had a good time....laughing at the menu card all over again!!

10 comments:

  1. Hehe... U open your own Indian food restaurant there.

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  2. I agree with you totally on the vada en dosa issue and the menu card. Totally inedible and hilarious strictly in the same order.

    HOWEVER you should try the mango lassi, the avial and the tamarind rice. Yumm. We loved the tastes. Authentic or not I don't know but taste very very south India. Lotsa coconut and chilli. Yumm again. Do try it.

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  3. HAHA the spellings are not very different from what u find in India barring the French spellings which they got right! I shud send u a pic I took at a client's cafeteria! One wud have thought the client being a huge company wud have done a spell check on the stall ;-)

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  4. ROFL....simply hillarious..esp chuseum!! Did you take some pics of the simply awesome "cut-vada"?? Peace Pulavu sounds Sooo Kannadiga!!

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  5. Nice hotel review - hope to see more :)
    lassy Mung :D interesting names
    No idea what chuseum is . I guess Mung is not Mung dal but means sweet ? :)

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  6. Shardul........maybe a shack in Goa someday :)

    Sharavati, I don't know if we'll go back again after how disappointing the food was the first time :( BTW....we make tamarind rice at home all the time
    Rekha.......the owner is from Sri Lanka....it's his version of south indian food

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  7. Interesting ... so there is a market out there for real indian food? ;-)

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  8. I'm not sure.....most restaurants cater to the Dutch palate

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  9. mung = mango..may be ..educated guess...

    Restaurant is indeed terrible !

    I guess its only restaurant where you get food...It has nothing to do with the Indian kitchen :-)) Not a single dish is close to authentic Indian food.

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  10. I agree though I must admit I went back to the restaurant a few weeks ago to try their lemon rice....was edible but not great...

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