Veggie Bites

Well, for those of you who know me, or who regularly read these reviews (!!), you’ll know that Bollywood is pretty much my favourite Indian restaurant. And that usually we order the same things, with only a small amount of variation! This time we did order mostly the usual stuff, but we also tried a dish that we have never ordered from here before. Our standard dishes were palak paneer (spinach and cheese), dahl bollywood – both were top notch as usual – although, the palak paneer was quite a lot greener than it usually was – it still tasted good, but it will be interesting to see how it is next time. The new dish we ordered was aloo gobi (potato and cauliflower). I cook this dish a lot at home, but very rarely order it from a restaurant. Having had it, I think it will become one of our standard favourites – it was really good. My only complaint would be that there was not enough of it! It was well cooked, nicely spiced and was kind of creamy (but without the cream!). We also had naans and a mixed raita, and I have to say, once we had eaten most of that, we could barely move – which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing since the only place I was going after an extremely long week was bed!

This was a take away meal with after a very long day! We went for 2 serves of the veggie pakoras (yum!) and a variety of mains. Old favourites such as dahl Bollywood and palak paneer, and we tried the veggie korma instead of the veggie jalfrezzi, and our friends opted for some tandoori chicken as well. We also ordered a mixed raita and some garlic naan and some sun dried tomato naan. All the old favourites were great, the veggie korma was a very nice change and may become an old favourite in the future (the only down side was the inclusion of peas!) and our friends managed to eat all of their chicken! There wasn’t a whole lot left over, but we still managed to make room for some home made chocolate chip cookie pie…

This was our first weekend back in Canberra after arriving home from our trip, so we decided to celebrate by going out for dinner! Since I was kind of craving good Indian food, we decided to go to our favourite place! I think that I must have gotten a little too used to the restaurant service in the US – it is always quick and efficient and I love the way that you always have iced water and that it is regularly topped up… But I digress… The food was good as always, we had the mixed veggie entree (I think we will have to try a single entree next time as this tends to be a little on the expensive side!). For mains, we opted for palak paneer and a veggie korma, along with a mixed raita and some breads. Add in a few glasses of wine and the bill was a lot more than I expected! The service was a little slow – but I am not sure whether it was really slow or if I was just used to the US style service and it seemed slow. But as I said, the food was good – and that is what it is all about, right?

We read that this place had a good variety of vegetarian options, so we went out of our way to go here and eat. They did have an excellent variety of vegetarian options, as most Indian restaurants do. We started with a vegetarian appetiser plate – containing samosas (no peas!), paneer bhaji, pakora and an interesting cold chickpea and potato salady thing. It also came with a variety of chutneys. The paneer bhaji was the highlight on this plate – however, everything else was also pretty good. We followed this with malai kofta, dhal and navratan veggies, along with rice and a variety of breads. The highlight of the meal was definitely the malai kofta! The dahl and the veggies were not as spicely flavoursome as we are used to. The description of the bread that I ordered on the menu was raisins, almonds and something else blended into a naan bread, however when it arrived, it also had those glacé cherries chopped up and blended into it – meaning that I absolutely hated it… I hate those cherry things. Luckily Martin didn’t care too much and shared his chapati and roti with me! All in all it was an ok Indian meal, I think we are completely spoilt by having a really good Indian restaurant very close to home and sadly this means all Indian we eat will be compared to that…

My parents claimed that this was really good Indian food and that they had been meaning to take us there for some time. I admit that I was a little dubious about the really good food claim, but they were right – oh boy, they were right! In fact they were so right, we got home delivery from here again a few nights later when visiting some friends. We started off with the complimentary pappadums that came with an amazing yoghurt sauce, luckily my Dad knows the owner’s father who came to chat with us and also got us a second serve of the pappadums! The yoghurt sauce was so good that we asked for the recipe and were told the basic ingredients, but not the quantities as that was the secret! Oh well, I’ll just have to try and make it up! We skipped entrees when we ate in, but tried the samosa’s when we got delivery, they were ok, I could do without them and just eat the mains! For our mains we had Malai Kofta, Palak Paneer, Dahl and Navratan Korma, my parents also ordered a chicken dish. Rice comes with the mains, and we also went for the cucumber yoghurt and a variety of plain, garlic and cheese naans. When we ordered delivery, we opted to chose a potato curry as well as Malai Kofta and Dahl. The food was fantastic, subtly spiced yet absolutely full of flavour. Sadly however, the Malai Kofta and the Navratan Korma both came with peas in them and of course I had to pick them out. The Malai Kofta were quite big and come as a serve of 2, although they are definitely big enough to share between 4, and there was plenty of sauce. In fact I spent the last bit of the meal dipping my naan into the left over sauce until it was all gone! There was literally nothing left in the bowls or on our plates at the end of the meal and when they were cleared the owner joked that he wouldn’t have to wash them! We were offered dessert, however, there was no possible way that we could have fitted it in, even though Martin was eye-ing the Gulab Jamun before we had even considered mains! I am sad that this place is not closer to home… although, it is probably a good thing as we would end up eating there far too often!

We used to get take away from here quite a lot many years ago, and I can’t remember why we stopped… maybe it was around the time that we stopped getting take away from anywhere! Anyway, we decided to eat here because it was close to a friend’s work and we were after a quick dinner before heading to the AIS Darters netball game. I was a bit surprised when we arrived as it is very small inside. I was also surprised that the menu was fairly small, but then, for such a small restaurant, it would probably be silly for them to have an incredibly large menu! There were five of us for dinner, so we ordered samosas for our entree – they come as a serve of two and when we ordered three serves, we were asked if we would prefer to only have five instead of six, which was a very sensible idea! While our friends ordered mainly meat dishes, Martin and I ordered Bombay Potatoes and a veggie kofta (veggie balls in a yummy sauce), both of which were fantastic! The veggie kofta was a bit surprising – I think I expected something curry-like – more like a veggie korma, but the kofta were well made, sweet and held together beautifully and the sauce was delicious! There was also a dahl on the table, and we shared some raita and all had a garlic naan and it was all great and reasonably priced… I am sad that we forgot that this place existed, and I think we will go back in the future!

This was an interesting meal, that started out with great entrées, went downhill for the mains, but kind of ended ok considering the problems we had. Well, that is a cryptic opening statement, so let me explain… There was actually much discussion as to whether we should actually eat here or not as in the past they have been a little slow to bring out the food, but considering it was after 9pm, we finally decided that it should be ok, and it was, the food was brought out quite quickly after we ordered. Even though there were carnivores among us, we decided to make it a vegetarian night and started with the veggie samosas and aloo tikki chat (spicy potato patties – which are my favourite!). The veggie samosas almost had more peas than potatoes (and yes, I spent ages picking them all out)! And the aloo tikki chat were great! As I said, great entrées, so I was looking forward to the mains. We had ordered aloo curry (potato curry), veggie korma, saag panir (spinach and cheese) and dahl with five types of lentils, along with basmati rice, raita and garlic naan. The dahl was ordinary and almost had the consistency of glue or paste, the saag panir was pretty good, the veggie korma was also pretty good but full of peas and the aloo curry came with rather large chunks of chicken in it… When it arrived we thought it looked meaty – beefy rather than chicken, but put it down to chunks of potato covered in the curry sauce. However, the chicken was soon revealed. We returned it (we had to take it to the counter as the wait staff seemed to disappear as soon as we had our food) and it was replaced with a non-chicken version which was almost too spicy to eat… Three different people apologised to us for the mix up (there is a chicken and potato curry on the menu that obviously uses the same curry sauce and the chef must have misread the order) and eventually we were told that we would not be charged for that dish – which was nice. So, a good start, downhill for mains and an ok finish! However, even if I ignore the problems with the chicken in our vegetarian potato curry, I didn’t think that the food was incredibly great, and I doubt that I would go back again, especially considering there is a large number of other Indian restaurants in Canberra.

This was a takeaway experience with some friends, and I am glad that we decided to try this place from the large number of takeaway menus we had to choose from. I have heard that it is supposed to be good, and this takeaway confirmed those rumours! We started with veggie samosa’s (yes, with peas – I picked them out, much to my friends amusement!), followed by a Palak Paneer and a dahl and for my carnivore friends, Tandori chicken, with garlic naans, raita and mango chutney. The Palak Paneer was spicy and creamy and tasted great. The dahl was one of two on the menu – I think we ended up ordering the one with 5 different varieties of lentils in it, and I couldn’t be bothered trying to see if there actually was five different types of lentils in it, but it tasted really good. I would really like to go back and try a few of the other veggie dishes – it is on the list for a return visit!

We had dinner here with friends before a concert. It was quite a bizarre experience because we bumped into the guy who used to own our favourite Thai restaurant before it suddenly became an African restaurant! He is now managing this restaurant and he remembered us! It struck us as a bit weird that a Thai person would be managing an Indian restaurant, but hey, I guess it doesn’t really matter if they do a good job! The food was pretty good, the entrées were great – aloo tiki and spinach fritters and potato salad (can’t remember the Indian name!). We then went mainly veggie for mains, malai kofta, vegetable jalfrezi and a dahl, along with a butter chicken. Of course, we also had breads and a mixed raita. It was all pretty tasty, although I have to say I was a little disappointed with the vegetable jalfrezi, but the malai kofta were pretty good. The raita had a very interesting flavour that none of us could place – I was a little concerned that the yoghurt may have been off, but then, none of us got sick. It is certainly not the cheapest Indian food around, but it is pretty good, so I think we will go back!

We had lunch here one Sunday, since we have kind of given up going to Bernadette’s as our last minute food stop and can’t quite figure out where else to go. Since it was lunch we didn’t want to go all out and order a lot of different meals, so we decided to have a few entrée type things. So we had idli’s, a spinach fritters and potato salad thing and a masala dosa – all very yummy and we have vowed to go back for dinner…