Referred by a friend we (wife, cousin and I) landed up at this place for a Thursday night dinner. The place is literally "upstairs", located on the 1st floor of a small building located on the corner of the street. Given the name and the location, for some reason, I was expecting a kind of fancy little place, but this one turned out to be a restaurant in the no frills category. It was a small corridor kind of a space on the 1st floor with minimum to no decor and 10 tables. Infact, it looks a lot more fancier in the photos (including the one I have posted) than what it really is!! Having said that, what catches your attention as soon as you enter the place is an elderly gentleman with a guitar sitting at the entrance and playing soul music. So apparently, he was going to be our entertainer for the night… and did pretty good…
We were quickly ushered to a table in the far end of the restaurant and provided with a few menus.. One look at the menu and I couldn’t keep my eyes off the pricing...now we have been to a lot of restaurants and have seen way more expensive places, but this one, given the look and feel of the place seemed very expensive. Of course, we hadn't tasted the food yet, so it was too early to form an impression, but, the look, feel and ambience to the price ratio seemed to be heavily lopsided… Now Kochi was known for reasonably priced restaurants, but it seems like that's a thing of the past!!!
Anyway, now that we were here, we moved away from the pricing and went thru the rest of the menu. For one, the place had quite a few options to choose from, especially if you are a meat/ sea-food lover and there were a fair amount of vegetarian options as well. The vegetarian food was not marked out/ identified separately, so one might need to read thru the entire description before they can figure out if it was vegetarian or not.
We went ahead and ordered one portion of Bruschetta, one chicken soup, one fried squid, one chicken calzone, spaghetti in Mama Rosa sauce and one portion of prawn in butter garlic sauce served with rice. The order was served fairly quickly. Once the food was on the table it was gone in no time. The presentation was very mediocre, but the food was tasty and had the right flavours and balance. Now in general, I prefer the taste to the presentation, so this was fine with me… but yeah, given the pricing, I would have expected a lot more fancier presentation. Let's move on from presentation… the spaghetti in the red tomato based sauce was one of the better ones I have had ever. The sauce did not taste of tomato sauce or tomato puree which is what ends up happening in most places. It was mildly creamy, mildly sour, filled with flavour and to top it all, the spaghetti was nicely coated in the sauce. That was definitely the tastiest spaghetti I had in a while. The grilled prawn was really good as well, albeit the sauce had a tad too much butter, good for us but for few others that might be a problem… Bruschetta had a more homely look and feel… looked like they had used a store bought bread loaf for base instead of a home baked base. However, the tomatoes were nicely coated with olive olive oil and topped with flavourful parsley and basil. Squid was fresh and was done tempura style. It was done well and crispy.. Full points for that… Soup was good too, but nothing out of the world .. Calzone was also nicely prepared and had smooth mushroom and cheese stuffing in it. To top it all we ordered two portions of chocolate lava cake with ice-cream. The flavour was good and it was not overly sweet. However, it was baked a minute or two longer than needed, solidifying the lava… We did bring it to the attention of the owner cum chef and he agreed that it was indeed baked a little longer than needed. Apparently that was done to suit the taste of some customers who complain that the cake was uncooked… well, not exactly what I wanted to hear…but yeah that’s what it was…so not much of a lava cake. That's probably one dish that would get a 2 on 5, thanks to the extra 2 mins of cooking.
From a service standpoint, felt that the staff could have been more knowledgeable about the food. They were literally staring at me when I asked for a few recommendations… The owner/chef was kind enough to come to us and spend some time talking about himself and the place. However, he seemed to be a bit too particular about keeping his menu clean/ stain free and told us a couple of times to keep it clean. Once he even started wiping it with a tissue paper while I was going thru it… :) … that was a first for me.
Outside of that, he was still nice!!!
In short, if you are looking for a nice setting, décor, ambience etc…this is not the place for you. If you are looking for reasonably good Italian food served in a very basic setup then go right ahead…mind it, the cost is that of a fine dining place though!!!
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