While I did a small rant about buffets in my last post, yes, buffets around the city are becoming a set of average food with a lot of variety with ability to eat more, rather than focus on quality. If I had known that the invite to Taj Clubhouse for the Karavalli food festival was a buffet, I would have skipped it. Most certainly!!! And then I would have regretted it! Forever. Granted, buffets are buffets even if it is at the Taj. But when some dishes are stunners, the buffet is more than worth it.
It all started off with the crab. With a nice nut cracker at our disposal, this crab cooked with spices and the shell intact was a stunner! A stunner by a long margin and the probably the second best crab I have had in Chennai, the first being the Stuffed Crab in Shell at Blue Diamond! I don't know what was so good in this crab. Fresh. Check. Flavour. Check. Spices. Check. Fantastic. Check. I could go on and on. For the first time, I had about 4-5 large pieces of crab. My fellow foodie had a similar number, but another foodie missed out. He dismissed that he likes only soft shell crabs. His loss! The vegetarians had a tough time looking at us tearing out crabs. No fork and knife for this. Downright dirty!!!! And so worth it.
I can finish my post here and the visit to this festival will still be worth it, but there was more. The fish in the starters was quite nice too. Then there was some mediocre chicken and more mediocre stuff like in all buffets. And between such dishes came more excellent ones!!!! The Chicken cooked in a coconut gravy. Stunner!!!! It was the perfect accomplice for the idiyappam and the parota. Three each. Same story. Don't know what was so good because I could not deconstruct the dish. It was flavourful, mild in spice, not heavy on the stomach and like the crab had all the checks in my boxes.
And then more average stuff. Then another stunner. Kadalai Curry. It went well with parota, kerala rice and the neer dosa. My friend was raving about the fish gravy, but I gave it a miss. 3 parotas, 3 idiyappams, 5-6 crabs were enough to make any buffet worth it.
And then another stunner. S. StunnerS. The desserts. The same dessert that was in the Goan Food festival at Hyatt, but a notch better here. The bebinca and dodol, with ice cream. Both, like the rest of the meal, had a home cook touch to it and I had to really control myself from over eating. Already I had to roll to the car!!!!
Karavalli the iconic restaurant at Bangalore and serves food from the Goan, Mangalore and Kerala, essentially, coastal regions of South India!!!! The festival is on till the 27th of September!!!!! Nothing extra for this as its part of the buffet.
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