A sudden plan to eat out somewhere in the vicinity of our home. Most of the times, I try not to repeat the restaurant we have visited. This gives me a chance to write something new on my blog 😉
Bhatinda Xpress is one place that I have been waiting to try since they opened, or in fact, reopened after they relocated from the Velachery Link Road, Taramani to the same building that houses the popular Vegetarian Punjabi restaurant ‘Pind’, in Velachery. These two restaurants are run by the same management.
The restaurant is located on the First Floor and entrance to the restaurant is on another side as compared to Pind. However it looks like they have a common valet parking and that was convenient. As we entered, the ambience was impressive. Similar to Pind, it was catchy with a lot of attention to detail. The atmosphere was very inviting with a Punjabi number in the background, hard not to shake to the Punjabi beats 😉
We settled down and were good to order in a few minutes. They served a welcome drink which was a nice Jaljeera (grape..I think) juice. Ordered Two by Four of Sweet Corn Chicken soup. For starters, ordered Banjara Kebab and Malai Chicken Tikka, both recommended by them. The soup was very good, hot and tasty, just how we wanted it. Banjara Kebab was spicy and kids struggled a bit, but they were more than happy to have Malai Chicken Tikka as that was specifically recommended as non-spicy and good for kids. Both the kebabs were wonderful!
Ordered two Butter Rotis, a Garlic Naan, Methi Malai Murg (you read it right, Chicken again!) and a Chicken Special Dum Biryani (and again!). Only after the meal we realized that this was an ‘all-chicken’ meal and only the dessert did not contain Chicken in it 😉 Butter Roti and Garlic Naan were awesome ! Malai Methi Murg was the highlight of the meal, absolutely delicious! The only not-so-impressive dish was the Special Chicken Dum Biryani. We all felt the masala was a bit on the higher side and it could have had a little more salt. A pinch of salt would have definitely made it taste better. We were quite full by now, and asked for more than half of the Biryani to be packed.
Not wanting to miss the Pan ice cream, ordered just one and shared it among ourselves. It was very good.
The dinner set us back by about 1.2K and included a Service Charge of 5% which, in my opinion, was absolutely worth it. Tinku waited on our table and the service was very polite and pleasant. Overall, a very satisfying dinner !
Just to add, we entered around 08:30 PM and I should say, I was surprised to see that there were not too many guests in the restaurant. Out of curiosity, just browsed through a few reviews on Zomato, which still features the same restaurant with the earlier address. Quite a few reviews seem to suggest that the food was good, but the ambience was very average ! Curious if that could be one of the reasons for still not being so popular after their relocation – Same name with an earlier listing on Zomato. I think their Advertisement team needs to fire all guns to clearly push the message that the ‘new’ Bhatinda Xpress is entirely different from what they have seen in Velachery Link Road, Taramani. I would love to see this place pick up and start drawing steady crowds!
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