The brunches is the city are slowly but steadily moving towards Lunches-called-Brunches!!!! The last time I had a proper brunch on a Sunday was at The Park last year, which had a good selection of breakfast foods, but the next few lunches, at Marriott, Leela and the likes have all become lunches. Few, if not all, had almost no breakfast dishes on the brunch menu! No pan cakes, dosa, waffles were there in any of their brunches. I guess, the Chennai market, doesn't allow them to do it, so no point cribbing.
But if you walk into a Saravana Bhavan on a Sunday morning, you will realise that Chennai does have a huge market for breakfast! Maybe the vast majority don't prefer the brunch, which is essentially eating a late breakfast and lunch together! Maybe we prefer to eat lunch at lunch time and breakfast at breakfast time! So poor me was made to wake up early on Sunday just to eat a good breakfast!
After deciding that the only way to get a good breakfast was to get to a breakfast, we then had to narrow down a place. Marriott? The Park? Saravana Bhavan? Hyatt? Next was to firmly decide that we wanted more than just idly and dosa, but precisely wanting a continental breakfast! So we decided to go with a safe option, a good hotel. And being close by, we narrowed it down to the Hyatt Regency. Made reservations, woke up at 8 (yes, 8 am) and drove down and settled next to a beautiful window seat, right next to the terrace garden! If I was on a holiday (not the Sunday holiday), this would have been a great seat!!!! Reminds me, I haven't been on a holiday for a long time!
It was not a majestic breakfast by any standards and was certainly not the king size that I had expected. We started off with a nice soft Bernier which had a good dose of cream, some decent hash browns and grilled veggies and roasted potatoes. From the live counter, we got an excellent cheese omelette that I couldn't have enough of, but controlled my appetite as I wanted to try most of the dishes on offer. From another live counter, we got ourselves a pancake with maple syrup that was good and a very very bad waffle that I couldn't go beyond one bite! It was hard and the batter was tasteless! And then a round of Indian breakfast, so I got a good masala dosa, a vada and a nice carrot idly with sambar. Pongal was good too, but the upma wasn't. Finished off with a not-so-bad croissant and a very nice selection of pastry and sweet breads from that section, which, unfortunately, I don't have a photo of. Cheese selection was almost non existent.
This is a good breakfast for the stay-in guests, especially when it comes free with the room, but right now I don't have a measure of what breakfast the Chennai hotels have to offer!!!! The breakfast at Hyatt was priced at Rs. 630 + taxes and comes to about Rs. 1500 for two. Next week, L'amandier for breakfast!
Oh, I more than made up for the sleep. Landed home at 1030 AM and I think when I woke up, it was Monday! Or may be Sunday evening, I don't know!
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