We are welcomed by The Host to the Wanderlust festival being held across the Sly Granny outlets in Delhi- NCR and Bengaluru. The festival is the first in a series that the brand has dubbed The Explorer’s Club: a cocktail series “inspired by travel, flights of fancy, new sensations and experiences,” with every three months of this year bringing in new destinations, drinks, and dining experiences.
The Wanderlust festival taps into iconic bars across the globe, with the menu boasting eight signature cocktails, a la Sly Granny, from Harry’s Bar in Venice (Italy), Long Bar (Raffles Hotel, Singapore), Dante (New York City), American Bar (Savoy Hotel, London) and Bar Hoshi (Tokyo).
The Host, in case you were wondering, is a gin cocktail from Harry’s Bar in Venice, a beguiling mix of spirit, orange juice, and bitters: suitable for beating what is supposed to be an extremely hot March. Incidentally, if you want to recreate the drinks at home later, the restaurants are also handing out the tinctures created in-house for each drink to bills that exceed Rs 1,500.
As we unwind with The Host, we toy with the Deconstructed Cheese Toast, Pork Ribs, and Barcelona Shrimp. Starting from the sea, as with all great journeys, the shrimp is a delicious rendition of the classic Spanish tapas, gambas al ajillo (shrimps with garlic), with the shellfish tender enough to begging to be bitten into, yet spiked with enough garlic to fend off a vampire.
The Cheese Toast comprises crisp Melba toast lashed with pimento cheese, charred chillies and a variety of other tastes and textures that make you re-evaluate how you consume cheese toast at home. And then there were the pork ribs, served with a highly complementary green apple and salad slaw. Yes, dear reader, we made pigs of ourselves, our only regret being that we could not eat the bones too.
While all this was going on, we bid adieu to The Host and went on to a dalliance with The Italian from Dante’s (New York City). The cocktail is a robust muddling of gin, port wine, and a splash of orange juice, accented with cardamom and toasted almonds.
To go along with such a potent potion, we said hello to another little piggy in the form of Biscuits and Gravy, the restaurant’s haute take on a classic, but humble, soul food dish from the southern US. The buttermilk biscuits take a leisurely dip in herb and bacon gravy, accompanied by crumbled smoky pork sausages. Salivating yet?
At: All Sly Granny outlets Price for two (with taxes and alcohol): Rs 2,500