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After a splendid Sunday lunch at Lollo Rosso and a splendid
event with friends, we decided to have the last meal of the day at Bogarosa,
and before I say anything else, it was a wonderful ending to a wonderful day!
It wasn’t absolutely delightful but it was great!
So if you’re a first timer there, you’ll easily be able to
locate the place if you put that up in google maps. Also, parking isn’t that
big an issue since it has ample space around the place. Now the first thing
that you notice when you arrive is the sheer size of the restaurant. It is
huge! An entire building is dedicated to just being a restaurant. So there’s a
lot of space everywhere. They have old style heavy iron patio furniture on the
outside. When you enter the façade through their pink door, you’ll find the
huge 60’s style sofa chairs and mirrors in the passage way which by the way is
a very nice spot to get your pictures clicked. The indoors too has handsome furniture
which is comfortable and the décor is done very tastefully. For those who are
looking for some good Instagram photos, this is the place for you. As I have said
earlier, they’re huge so even a party of 10 could be accommodated easily. Now we
went there for dinner on a Sunday and from what we had heard, we were expecting
to wait for atleast 20 minutes before we could get in but surprisingly, there
was no wait. We went straight in. It was around 9:45 and the restaurant was
half full. So it really depends on your luck as to how long you might have to
wait.
Coming to the staff and the setting. The décor is quite
calming and soothing to look at. The shelves are full of trendy kitchen
utensils and servery. The tables have these cool table cloths beneath the glass
tops that go perfectly well with the whole setting. The chairs are a
combination of large and small and it is sort of a mix and match there but then
again it is all comfy and trendy so that’s that. They even have a raised
counter and high chairs for those who would prefer to work on their laptops
there, however I am not sure if they provide you with a free wifi. But if you
carry your own internet, it shouldn’t be an issue. The staff seems well trained
and they are quick between the courses to clear up your plates and provide you
with new ones. The only drawback is that you constantly need to remind them to
refill your water. That is something they tend to overlook or forget.
The menu is quite extensive and they have tried to give you a
huge array of dishes but that did not work for us because they did not have
quite a few dishes mentioned therein. On enquiring, they said that they haven’t
yet started serving those dishes. The waiter said and I quote, “Sir, we haven’t
had these dishes since the first day.” So my natural question was, why they are
still there in the menu, to which he had no response. I guess they’re still finalizing
on the menu and maybe they’ll come up with a solution to that. We were
fascinated by the names of some dishes like the pizza samosas or the molecular
puchkas but they weren’t available so went with what they had in store for us. Same
was the case with a few of the drinks and tbh, it sort of gives you a
disappointing feeling when you don’t get what you want but then that’s life! Can’t
always get what you want. ;)
So we ordered three drinks, the Angoori Soda, the Caiprioska,
and the Pomegranate Sangria. All three of them looked amazing and tasted very
good. In fact they went very well with the food that we had ordered so no
complaints there. The next was the soup. We had ordered their Pink Root Consommé
with Crisp Bread, Nutmeg and Citron. It a 5/5. We were absolutely in love with
the colour the consistency, the round croutons and the taste of the soup. It was
so good that we kind of wanted to cancel the rest of the order and just have
more soup. (And the soup kind of raised our expectations from the rest of the
order.) So we loved the soup.
Next came in the Margarita bursts. They are their version of
a cheese ball. I think it was the soft pizza dough which had a cheese filling
in them. It looked very well, the presentation was spot on but they were almost
like a miser when it came to the quantity. Five tiny balls for 225 bucks +
taxes felt like a pocket pincher. It did taste good but the quantity was almost
too negligent. Given we were three people dining there, we couldn’t even
distribute it evenly! Sad.
For the main course we went for the Roman Sensation, Kolkata
style street biryani and Afghani spiced paneer with Garlic Naan. Now before I begin
I would like to say one thing. The restaurant believes in European Portion
sizes, meaning thereby, if you order one dish, it is only for you and not meant
to be shared by 2 or 3 people, as is the case in India. The quantity in most
cases is enough for one person but in some cases it is too less even for a
single person. So I suggest you order as many dishes ass many people you have
on the table if you have a decent appetite. Otherwise you might be disappointed
with the quantity if you’re not accustomed to having European Portions.
The Roman Sensation was a disaster. There was nothing roman about
the taste. It was a sizzler basically and we all know how that works, they put
up three to four components together on a hot plate and these components
compliment each other. Far from that, some of them were undercooked. To begin
with, the hot plate wasn’t lined with enough cabbage leaves so the pasta stuck
to the plate and gave it a burnt flavor, not to mention, it went dry and felt
chewy because of the overcooking by the excess heat of the hot plate. The mac n
cheese had a béchamel sauce that was raw. We could taste the flour in that and
the spaghetti was given in a red tomato that was too sweet for our preference. The
only good thing on that platter was probably the French fries. So that, we did
not like.
After that, we had the Kolkata biryani. Again, dinghy portion
sizes. It wasn’t enough even if a single person had it alone. Served in a tiny
tuna can it looked very pretty. The taste was good and we loved the chef’s special
curry that they served along with the biryani. But that’s that. And when you
say Kolkata style biryani, one expects potatoes in the biryani because that is
the only major distinction between a biryani from any other part of India and a
biryani from Kolkata. But the potatoes were missing too. Also, it is really
pulao if you don’t have any meat or poultry in the rice but to each his own!
We had only ordered the above to dishes to begin with as we
thought that would be sufficient but given the serving portions, we had to
order a third dish and that was the Afghani spiced paneer. Before the waiter
could serve us, we tasted the dish and asked them to make it extremely spicy. They
took it back and brought it out again with all the three chilies, red, green
and black! And we liked that. The subzi tasted very good and the naan was
crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside. So the end was good and that
was their saving grace, I suppose.
So the place is definitely worth a visit and the food does
taste good but it can be a hit and miss for a few dishes. The drinks are definitely
good unless you have a really bad day. The staff and the service as great so I suppose
that should do it for them.
Bon Appetite!
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How many old bogarosa
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