THE hot tawa crackles delightfully as a scoop of cool batter solidifies, waiting to be stuffed and folded to embellish the plate. At the live counter, there is a world in the making. For with 101 different choices people can pick from, it can be called a world of its own.
It might come across as surprising, that there can be many a miscellaneous recipe for a dish, generally restrained to the two popular ones- masala dosa and ghee roast. But with the ongoing dosa festival at Olives, Deccan Plaza, the vista for the South Indian speciality seems to have been stretched out to the point of having to exhaustively go through the 101 varieties of dosas listed on the menu card shaped like one. Standing beside Selvaraj, Executive Chef behind the live counter, drenched in the heat of evening time cooking, I am amazed by how the dishes rolled out- Pudina dosa, pizza dosa, kadala dosa, chettinadu pattani dosa, paneer dosa, Spanish dosa and even chocolate dosa!
What Olives has adopted is a concept that works like a filling, wedging the gap between lunch and dinner. From three to 6.30, the tables see the simplicity of the South Indian tea time favourite, in any of the following base - corn flour, rice flour, wheat flour, ragi or pearl millet. Be it the spicy chettinadu dosa, or the mashed beetrrot stuffed diamond dosa, innovation has rightly hit the kitchen.
The term Spanish dosa perhaps sounds like a blast from the Mediterranean, but a dish prepared with capsicum, tomato, mushrooms and paneer, it seems to be rightly named. The cheese is found missing and rightly so, since it doesn’t gel with the Indian batter.
And to whip it off, there is room for a sweet ending as well. Chocolate dosa, a perfect tea time dessert (perhaps a little dip to go with it could help), has added a new dimension to the concept of tea time snacking, introducing dosas with a dash of bitter chocolate. As the chef pours melted chocolate on the neatly laid out dosa, he is careful not to spill it on the hot tawa, as chocolate gets burnt if it’s in direct contact with the hot plate. But as he takes it out gently, it perceptibly could pass as a pancake, in the thinner form, perhaps even mounting to be a good choice for breakfast. Rightly said, there are no boundaries in cooking.
The dosa festival is on at Olives, Deccan Plaza, Royapettah till December 7. Open between 3 pm to 6.30 pm.