It was a long day indeed, finished with the Annual Day celebrations in my daughter’s school, decided to eat out. Heading straight to a restaurant after the celebrations was a practice that we have been following for the last few years ! It was a Saturday and wife preferred vegetarian. Since daughter was already tired, we wanted to head to some place in the vicinity. Obviously Vegetarian in Velachery, two places were in my mind – Pind and Haven Sampoorna, decided on the latter !
I’ve had a quick diet lunch here earlier and have somehow never considered this place for a complete meal, probably because it is vegetarian 🙂 We entered to find a packed restaurant, and were pretty surprised ! We had to wait for just 5 minutes and we got a table! As we entered, we were actually surprised by the staff wishing us. Every other person said Good Evening, Welcome, Have a nice Dinner 🙂 Felt strange actually !
Kids were sort of sleepy, decided to go with the maincourse and no starters. Looked at the menu and in about five minutes, decided what we were going to order. Now comes the sober, and stern waiter! He was clearly not one of these goody goody types. No smile, no suggestions, just straight to the point. Wasn’t very pleased, but then, just let it go. We had to wait for about 20-25 minutes for the food to come and we were informed about it in advance, so that wasn’t a problem.
Food arrived, and it looked awesome, and tasted equally good! In short, I would rate their food really yummy! Our order was a mix of Italian, Oriental and Indian 🙂 – Vegetable lasagna, Creamy italiana where you could choose your pasta. My daughter likes farfalle and she fondly calls it ‘butterfly pasta’. Unfortunately they had only Spaghetti, Penne and Fussili. So she settled for Penne, Hunan Vegetable Noodles served with Kung Pao Vegetables, and a Haven Veg Biryani. I had some nice ‘complete’ North-Indian Thali in mind, but they didn’t have any for dinner. So settled for Biryani. As I mentioned earlier, food was wonderful! Well, presented, and tasted very good. We were quite full and decided to order just one Falooda and share. We realized we ate it quite fast and needed another one 🙂 So had to repeat the Falooda. It was good too, but a bit watery at times. No complaints though.
Finally asked for the bill, it came in a few minutes. The dinner set us back by 1.6K and was well worth it. I put my card in the folder and was waiting for the waiter to take it, he was busy with something else and didn’t show up for quite sometime. After ten minutes, requested another person to finish the billing. He wasn’t exactly a waiter, he wore a different costume, he brought the swipe machine to my table and finished the billing ! As we left, there was still no sign of the waiter. We walked out and three people were at the door, not a word of thanks or goodbye ! Not that i expect these things, but then as I mentioned earlier, the welcome and thank you were of completely different standards! I did notice that the same waiter had an altercation with someone on a table behind ours. I am not blaming him, though the communication got better with him towards the end of the meal, it wasn’t very pleasant at the start. Overall, I would have preferred a better experience in terms of service.
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