Let's start with food....

So just a few days back I viewed a movie with such superlative ingenuity that it will stand out as a sterling beacon in my long and ongoing association with movies.. While I will cover its greatness in vivid detail in a later post, here it serves to establish a background; A dear friend is days away from flying to a far off land to pursue her dreams; a movie followed by lunch where the farewell-cum-belated-birthday gifts are given and we desperately try to create moments to hold on to and hopefully fill the vacuum that the next few years might create.

So let's deal with the movie later, and delve right into the lunch. After a short brainstorming session, (which eliminated Barbecue Nation on financial grounds, the fact that they serve alcohol notwithstanding) we arrived at a refreshingly conventional option - BR Mathsya.

We were a party of 4, with a clear vegetarian majority; Udipi food served in buffet-fashion made perfect sense. Out of the theater, onto the ubiquitous auto and outside the hotel complex in no time.

Have visited the place a couple of time before, but that was long ago. An eye-catching image of the Mathsya avataram just as you enter; there is some outdoor seating for chats and all that jazz.

A board announces that the buffet is in progress and the price tag - Rs. 255 + taxes. A friendly floor manager ushers us in and seats us at a table. We are not sure how to start; do we have to pay first or start gorging right away? A waiter informs that the soup would arrive and then we were free to hit the buffet tables; payment would be at the end.

The soup at best can be described as a bearable version of Rasam. We were more interested in finishing it and heading to the real stuff, so didn't really gauge the gravity of the ominous sign that the soup presented before us. Oh yeah, we did get a glass of rose-colored Rooh Afza-variant, but no one bothered to finish it.

Off to the tables laden with food!!!! Pick up a plate and pile on the starters; a few types of salads, one with sweet corn, one with soaked broken uluttam paruppu that's a familiar sight in brahmin wedding banana leaves. We move on to the "tiffin" items - puri with a sabzi, something that looked like the mallu puttu and a couple of other accompaniments.

Plates laden, we reach our tables; the salads (they called them kosumaris) were good. The puri predictable, the puttu-clone turned out to be sweet and nasty-tasting! The first round abysmal, we return with hopes of better pickings the second time around.

I have to admit, I have a love affair going on with the most famous of Udupi creations - a well made Bisibela Bath. Yes, well made is the important term here. So, when my eyes sight a big bowl full of this wondrous concoction, one can not blame me for going for that second scoop. The rice did look bigger than usual, but really, if you expect a Udupi restaurant to get one thing right, it should be Bisi!!

I did pick up a couple of other items of lesser importance, barely holding back the water oozing out of my mouth; this was the defining moment - one that could tip the scales back in favor of BRM! And what a humongous disappointment it was. Without any hint of exaggeration, it was the worst Bisi Bela Bath I have ever had the unenviable pleasure of consuming. Dry, thick and tasteless with fat strips of over sized rice. I could have forgiven everything else, but this sealed BRM's fate. I would not be coming back for the buffet, ever again.

OK. This would be a one-sided account if I did not mention this. I have been to BRM before and had the Bisi as an a-la-carte dish and it was nothing but splendid - the right consistency, piping hot, oozing ghee and utterly delicious. But that does not mean that when you bundle it as a part of a buffet meal, you can bring down quality, not one, not two, but a hundred notches making one wonder if this indeed was the place where he tasted that uberlicious BBB.

All was not lost though. The dessert section was most certainly the highlight of the meal. Unlimited vanilla icecream (3 scoops only for yours truly), a truly delicious payasam, the expected fruit salad and sweets like mysore pak. The only letdown was the weird tasting sweet appam. You could also get mangalore chat made "live" to add a bit of a breather between the predominantly sweet stuff on your plate.

The bill for 4 went a little above a thousand bucks. Considering the fact that the friend who was flying away actually had to cover her plate with another to hide the huge amount of food she had shunned as unpalatable, (with the rest of us managing to eat the small portions we took of most of the food, and leaving the terrible ones untouched), we felt that we overpaid and under-ate.

Verdict: BRM - strictly for its a-la-carte menu. Feeling buffet-ish, please head in the opposite direction!

And that's the end of my first post! :D