HYDERABAD: As the fluffy clouds fill the city sky and people get ready to bring goddess Durga. The festive flavour is catching with a lot of restaurants and that’s how we get to relish Bengali delights as part of different food promotion. The premises of Qube Café, Siesta Hitech Hotel, as part of its Bengali Food Festival, is decked up with cut-outs of fish, Bengali taant saris while a giant poster of Howrah Bridge adorns one of the walls. There are live counters at the restaurant for Kebab Kathi Rolls with the crisp yet soft lacchha paratha filled with chunks of kebabs, onion rings, sauce and a dash of lemon and pepper. One can choose the Bengali delights from the buffets spread.
The hot Calcutta Chicken Biryani lives up to its name with fluffy fragrant granules and the chicken pieces with marinated and cooked with fragrant spices. For the starters the raw banana chops or mocha chops as they are better known in Bengal was nicely prepared and fried; the only disappointment was the mustard sauce which didn’t taste as good as the typical kasundi sauce.
The Khasir Shorba or mutton soup was mildly spiced, but the warmth kept the monsoon-rain chill away from my bones during the evening. To balance out the none-vegetarian palette which dominates the Bengali cuisine, we tried Radha Ballavi.
The luchis filled with urad dal were soft and fried till golden making perfect pair with chholar daal or grams cooked in a gravy. It reminded me of a perfect Bengali breakfast on a Sunday. We recommend Ilish Machher Paturi: Hilsa, the monarch of fish, wrapped in a banana leaf and then cooked on the griddle. Chef Prabhakar had curated the promotion well enough. Roshogullas weren’t that spongy but my tastebuds welcomed them.
The festival is on till September 17
Charges: `777++ For lunch and dinner