Monday, March 25, 2013

A great weekend and a restaurant review!

Hi guys,
I do know it has been a while since I posted anything nice, cheery and fun in here. What to do? Life's kinda been that way :( Oh well. No more brooding. This past weekend was a good and fun one! What did we do?
Friday night K called from work and said he was going to bring back dinner from one of our most favorite joints in Besant Nagar. Its not the kinda place you sit down and eat. Its a seedy, shady joint that serves yummylicious food. So naturally I was only too happy to oblige because it meant no cooking and it also meant eating great food in the luxury of your own house. Saturday was another good day - well for the most part we just stayed home. Woke up late, did a lazy breakfast and cooked lunch, cleaned etc. And then met Krish & Sethu for dinner at Chap Chay(one of the main reasons for the post). Well what can I say? It's a pleasure to review the restaurant.
Chap Chay is a new restaurant at Raintree, St. Mary's Road. The cuisine is Pan Asian - notice I didn't say Chinese. That is because its got flavors from China, Japan, Thailand etc. And I must say we all came out very impressed. The decor was nice, simple. Thank God there was no Buddha, at least I didn't see one! The place reminded me of a restaurant in St. Louis that I used to frequent - Stir Crazy (Remember I wrote about it here?). Basically, you choose your own veggies/meat, they have about 16 different types of sauces, choice of noodles or rice and the food gets cooked right in front of you. It was such a lovely sight to see the different colored fresh vegetables - broccoli, carrot, snow peas, red/yellow/green peppers, corn, lotus stem, water chestnuts.. I could go on & on. Some of the sauces were black pepper, chilli garlic(what I picked), Thai Basil(all hot ones) and some not so spicy ones such as Kung Pao, Hunan etc. My recommendation would be to take small portions of veggies and mix up one or two sauces and keep trying various combinations because it is unlimited. The mistake we did was to fill our bowls with all sorts of veggies and took just one sauce and by the time I finished my bowl I was completely stuffed and had no room for more. So be smart and have fun experimenting. Also, don't bother with starters of any sort - they just fill you up. We tried Dimsums(give it a miss) & Honey Glazed Vegetables(which was very nice). For dessert, the 4 of us dug into one plate of yummy fried ice cream!! The flavor was darn delicious. Service was very good. Priced at 650INR per person for the main course alone. Will we go back? Of course we will. But will be smarter next time around :-) We enjoyed and relaxed with drinks, good food & laughter. Overall an ideal way to spend Saturday night. Do give Chap Chay a try, I assure you won't be disappointed.
Sunday was another super busy day. We were spending the day with K's colleagues at Shilpa's house. Her folks had gone out of town and had invited a few of us over for drinks and lunch. She was a lovely hostess - her cook had made yummy egg pakodas, paneer pakodas, grilled chicken, masala peanuts, we had taken along some chips, juice, chocolate milk shake.. Sigh. As you can see, I was feasting! The afternoon was great fun. Mathangi & Michael are expecting a baby in May and were obviously the centre of attention - We discussed baby names, their maternity classes, heard all their work stories and kept laughing till our stomachs hurt! A great afternoon indeed. Post lunch, I was heading to see Ammai and my parents. Played carrom, cards and badminton with Vishal, Ammai and my mom. Very relaxing :-) I got home around 7:30 in the evening and was going to clean up and prep for Monday morning when Mathangi called to say she and Michael were going to Velacity for dinner and if we wanted to join them. K and I said ok and we got picked up, went to Tadka Talk in Velacity. To Michael's biggest disappointment, the place was vegetarian. Haha. Mathangi and I enjoyed the paneer tikka and mushroom soup. But we couldn't bear to see Mike's sad face. So we told him we will go to another place just for the main course. At 9:30 pm in the restaurant we were discussing where to go. Haha. That's how funny it was. Finally, we didn't have too much choice but to head over to Snow's Park in Velachery(an old haunt of mine and K's). Decent food, saaaddd ambience but fast service! Lol. So we went there, had garlic naans, dal tadka and of course Micheal ordered some Chicken Tikka and was happy :) By the time we reached home it was around 11:30! Needless to say, K and I crashed. Longgg day. But awesome weekend after a longgg time. Sooo worth every minute of it. K and I are heading to Pune this Thursday, so more updates on this space next week. Keep up with it, I promise some lovely pictures from Pune city :) Tata! 

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