Beach-side, Rooftop — Anniversaries and Budget friendly?
Hola Restaurante — Besant Nagar, Chennai.
Rooftops, romantic, quiet, isolated and peace! Lot of people search for these when they go out with their dear partners for dinners on special occasions. Well most of the places which offer these are sometime go very far from your wallet boundaries. But, there are exquisite. No comments on that. That feel-the-moment places. Then came our saviors. People that showed all the above, in a pocket friendly yet amazing places to celebrate. Among such places, Hola in Besant Nagar is one.
The place has been an attraction from very long and I had my eye on it from the very time I came to Chennai and started using Zomato. It’s been coming up in my feed then and while. So I decided to visit this place sometime and luckily that day came on our anniversary, We decided to go to a small and cute place rather than destroying our pockets for food only. We had few choices in mind, but we just went with this place. I called up the restaurant and made my bookings. I requested them to provide me with a isolated table on rooftop. They agreed to it happily.
The place is situated amidst of all the food joints of Besant Nagar Beach. Very easy to find and good parking space available. We reached there at around 0815 PM. A guy was there right near the building entrance asking us if were coming to Hola and redirected us to Second floor. The second floor is a closed dining area and it looks great I say. The place is pretty much busy. When I said I booked a table for rooftop, he asked us to continue to 3rd floor. We entered the rooftop with a big smile on the face. They received us well. When I told about the reservation, they saved a corner table for us and took us there.
Man, I have to tell you about the place. It’s an open space around 1200–1400 sq ft and it has 6 4-seater tables and a big 8+ seater for a big group. Every table has small candle lantern which will be lit after a table is occupied. The complete place has a very dim and soothing light effect. These gives the punch of romantic scene around you. Though 4 out of 6 (including us) tables were filled, the place is completely quiet. Place is wide and has live juice making counter. They also have a telescope, no idea if it’s working, a cool ship model on the big table. We sat in one corner table, as I’ve asked one, and this was towards the main road, but all you could see are the tall tress and few building. Not much noise from the road as it’s Besant Nagar. May be we can have a really great look at the beach if we come for lunch or breakfast (not in summers, we might get grilled in heat).
Next I’ve to tell you about the Menu card. It’s another thing that attracted me. Being a designer and love for art and graphic designing, the menu got registered in my mind for it’s design. So amazing and cool. Coming to items in Menu, I was little disappointed when they said no Egg items are available for dinner except during the breakfast. But they had a very wide range of pastas and new style of Pizzas.
Looking at the menu lot of things came into mind to order and try, but our tummy capacity restricted us. So we decided to go with our regular style of ordering. 2 drinks — Watermelon Cooler, Sparkling Mojito ; An appetizer — Chicken Chipotle ; A Main Course — Pasta Arabiata with Exotic Vegetables ; Dessert — Philadelphia Cheese Cake.
Drinks — They arrived just in minutes after we finished ordering. It was real fast and swift service. We never thought they will get it so soon. I think they had a walkie-talkie to communicate the table order while they confirm the order. So many people, so many orders yet they got the food so fast. That was one good system to communicate. The chef must be like a ‘Superman’ with incredible speed in cooking.
Watermelon Cooler : I first though this will be a combination of Watermelon and mint, rather it was just Fresh and crushed thick watermelon juice with lots of ice cubes (what he meant by cooler here, not mint like I thought). It was refreshing but not chill and taste was also little raw (the taste you get when eat the last white crust in watermelon). It would have tasted brilliant if he had added a little sugar.
Sparkling Mojito : This is exquisite. We didn’t expect this to taste so good. It’s basically lime and mint with sparkling water. The mint was crushed well to give you the mint tinge in every sip you take.
Appetizer — Chicken Chipotle : Chipotle is a Spanish word for smoke-dried jalapenos. It is used a chili in most of the Mexican Cuisines. Being spicy-lovers, we thought of going with this dish. It didn’t disappoint us at all. It has mild spice, saucy and platters of soft chicken. The dish looked so great and tested even better. While we were about to finish this, we got out Main Course.
Main Course — Pasta Arabiata : We ordered for chicken as an add on and fusilli for the pasta in the dish. It looked yummy. The moment we had it, we got only one word in mind — ’Tangy!’. What happens when eat a lot ‘Spanish Tango Lays / Red Lays packet’, you feel excessive. You won’t be able to eat much. Same case, it had too much of tangy taste. But luckily the appetizer we ordered saved our day. The combination was very good. When I mean combination, it’s not like how mix ‘poriyal’ in ‘sambar rice’. It’s more like having the appetizer in between, to change the taste. That worked well. After finishing this I had space for dessert, but my girl was already full. So I had ordered for only one dessert (if you were thinking why only one dessert for two people).
Dessert — Philadelphia Cheese Cake: It’s very tough to find a place in city where you get an ‘super’, ‘brilliant’, ‘amazing’, ‘tasty’, ‘yummy’, ‘wow’, ‘just wow’, type of cheese cakes. This one hits top of my list in that case. A perfect ending for the meal. They gave the cake with blueberry jam, which was even more yummy when eat together. Looking at my expressions, my partner couldn’t resist her tummy restrictions. She was also like in the ‘yummm..’ moment. We both loved the dessert.
Finally we asked for the bill and it was 1546/- which I felt completely worth for the experience and the food quality here. We enjoyed ourselves and our day pretty well and went home with happy smiles and a great click from one of the service guy.
