Palm Jumeira, in Royapettah is easily one of the most prominent restaurants on that road. Just opposite to the exit of Express Avenue Mall, this resaurant is hard to miss with its lighting and bright nameboards. Last time when a friend and I had dinner at Hotel Millath, we made note of this place and today, managed to strike it off my list!
This visit was quite unplanned actually. I was there to meet a friend in Triplicane and it was evening, just around Iftar time and could see so many people after their prayers. Our plan was to visit a place that is very popular among the local crowd in Triplicane. I did see quite a few restaurants, but surprisingly none of them were crowded. Quite perplexed actually! Where could all these people be eating?!? Drove further down and decided to try some snacks at Buhari Anna Salai. To our misfortune, there was a huge banner mentioning that the place was being renovated. Proceeded a bit further and then saw that there was perhaps a way to enter Buhari from the side. Way too forward to make a U-turn, decided to proceed towards Royapettah. The moment we spotted this place, decided to try it.
The interiors were very nicely done, a bit of Middle Eastern touch with the low seating, like Mandi Majlis. I couldn’t get a complete view of the seating, but I felt it was close to that. We took a normal table. Quick look at the menu, on seeing Chinese dishes in it, it was a bit disappointing! That has become a trend almost everywhere, only a few still remain as speciality restaurants, rest are all multi-cuisine to cater to everyone. Imagine Dindigul Thalapakatti having a barbeque counter 🙂
Ordered Chicken Pepper Soup to be served one by two, Mutton Haleem of weight 300g (they have two sizes – 300g and 500g), a Special Chicken Shawarma Roll, and a Chicken Seekh Roll.
They didn’t quite seem to uderstand that soup is meant to be served first 🙂 we got the Shawarma Roll first followed by the Haleem. In no mood to ask him where the soup was, it anyway came in a few minutes. Coming to how it tasted, all these three were awesome. Haleem tasted as nice as it looked. I also tasted a couple of spoons of it, liked it (btw I do not eat mutton in all forms). Chicken Shawarma Roll was tasty too, in fact, I could taste chicken and not just the gooey stuff like most places. Chicken Pepper Soup was very nice with chicken pieces absolutely not smelling at all. I have faced this problem almost everywhere! Here, I finished the last chicken piece in the soup. Chicken Seekh Roll was nowhere to be seen. We finished all of these and were still waiting, and finally it arrived. This one was much bigger in size, on cutting it into half, the cross-section of the Seekh was visible, well done. The outer wrap was actually Rumali Roti. Not sure what else went into making that roll, it was very dry and the filling just not enough for the amount of roti around it. All we could taste was roti, and sometimes the seekh. No accompaniment for this was served. On asking, we got a watery mint chutney which was okayish. It didn’t do much to improve the taste quotient. We wanted to finish with a Tea and we were informed that Tea and Coffee were not available.
Service was good initially, but then got a bit slow. It wasn’t anything worth complainig or praising. We were seated next to the counter on the first floor and there were about 4-5 people who were taking loudly about some maintenence issue (from what I heard, it was something to do with cctv camera). I wished they allowed the diners to eat in peace and reserved these discussions for later.
Overall, food was a mixed bag – Soup, Haleem and Shawarma were good, Chicken Seekh Roll was average, Tea/Coffee wasn’t available. Service was okayish. Paid 547 bucks in all, a slightly above average experience. Its not anything that would make me go back immediately!
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