Sauma: What are the Hindi words for boring and slow?

Two walk-ins during the busy Fringe Festival. We should have kept walking.

Food

• We went with the vegetarian Street Food Adventure. This means that I cant refer back to the menu to see what it was exactly that we were served, and so I will almost certainly stuff up the descriptions.
• We were first presented with some shot glasses filled with a green (pea?) soup, along with crispy rice (?) spheres. The idea being that you pour the soup into the sphere and then pop it into your mouth in one hit. If you can’t do that, things will get messy. This was the single most exciting part of the meal. Tasted pretty good and was a novel way to consume food. Would recommend.
• They followed the exploding soup spheres with chickpea and potato dumplings, which were crispy on the outside without being too dry on the inside, but ultimately a bit bland. The comment I have written down in my notes is ‘pleasant without getting near amazing’.
• Then came a boring mushroom dish and a boring salad. The mushroom was a simple grilled mushroom filled with some curry sauce, some nuts and sultanas and grapes. Madam Rabbit said it was ‘refreshing’, but to me it was boring. The salad was pointless.
• Next came a friend cauliflower dish, which came with a sweet sauce to contrast the salty cauliflower. Again, the dish was ok, not amazing.
• Then came a plum kofta, and then separately a little later a chickpea curry dish. The plum dish was sweet and the chickpea dish acidic (pickled carrots maybe?) and spicy. The chickpeas would have been very dry without the sauce.
• You may note these bullet points lack description, and this is directly correlated to the effort we felt from the kitchen.
• After waiting a long time for dessert (see below) we got some fruit icy poles. If I was a four year old in the height of summer I might have been ok with that, I guess?
• Overall, super disappointed. The banquet isn’t expensive at $50, so that goes in their favour, but I still felt super let down. I have been here before and found the food to be much much better that other time, and so I’m guessing they simply had an off night, and/or don’t care about vegetarians (which I don’t necessarily blame them for, to be honest).

Drinks

• No real comments, other than to say they didn’t replace our water jug after we got through the first one, and they had plenty of opportunity to.

Service

• The service was pretty shit.
• It’s not necessarily our waiter’s fault, although he did get a bit annoying by making jokes with the diners (not just us but tables around us also) that kind of came off as a little patronising. More jokes at his customers rather than with his customers. Anyways, it might not have been all his fault as I think the kitchen let him down a lot also.
• We waited a long, long time for our food. We sat down roughly the same time as a table next to us. That table finished their three course meal before we had our main dishes. Another table sat down and even THEY received their third round of food before we received our dessert.
• Why did they send the two curries out one after another? That was a terrible decision and I got mad about it.
• My notes are full of comments like ‘when is the food coming’ and ‘where is our ducking food’ (stupid auto-correct). It really took a long time.
• We asked a different waitress if we could order another drink and she said she would send her friend, but her friend never came. I hope her friend is ok.
• We never knew exactly how many dishes were still to come. At one point I thought they were waiting for me to pay the bill, but when we asked the lady said we had at least two more courses coming. It wasn’t clear whether they were to arrive that night or later through some subscription plan.
• We sat down at 6:44pm according to my photos. When we asked about when our dessert was due to come out at 8.45pm, our waiter said “… the owner is aware of it that’s all I can tell you.’ which is a really effing weird way of saying ‘sorry, we stuffed up, it’s on its way’.
• Overall, we waited more than two hours to slug through what was a pretty shitty meal.
• Our waiter thanked us for our patience (hah — he clearly didn’t see the look on my face as I scribbed notes into my iPhone) which does help take some sting out but doesn’t make it ok.

Ambience

• Look, who even cares at this point. It was ok, I guess.

Overall

Bad.

4 green mouth explosions out of 10