Heera

We visited this place with high expectations for my birthday dinner. First impressions – wow, looks pretty interesting! The walls , curtains, chairs are all blinged up and there are lovely chandeliers all around to give it a sort of Mughal palace feel. There is a big screen in the middle of the dining area playing old Bollywood cabaret songs.

 I liked the way the lights kept changing shades of colour , almost like a disco light. 

Another interesting thing was they had turbans and extensively decorated waistcoats for the diners to try on ,complete with fake swords. 

That was the only good part of the whole experience- had a good laugh with all of us trying them on and posing for pictures. After that, it went completely downhill.

For starters, we ordered the so called Heera delicacy ‘Lal Mirch ka murgh’ – the description was chicken pieces marinated and cooked with chilly paste and spices in a tandoor. Then we waited.. and waited… and waited.The waiter kept  reassuring us that it would be coming out soon. Finally after 30-40 minutes – seeing our grumpy faces I guess – he came and said it would take more time and whether we want to start with the mains. But we decided to wait for some more time. Finally it came out.

Lal Mirch ka murgh

 One taste and all our faces fell – it was just chinese chilly chicken – with a good amount of cornflour and ajinomoto mixed with some extra chilly powder. And I’ve had better chilly chicken from local places near my house. It was definitely not cooked on a tandoor – we asked the waiter and he said that was the cooking style of this dish , but if so it definitely should not be in the tandoor section. S believes that they just ran out at the last minute and bought chilly chicken from some nearby joint.

For mains, we planned to order a butter chicken and a mutton dish . I say planned because the waiter kindly informed us that none of the mutton items were available as it was over ! That was pretty surprising considering it was only 9pm and the place wasn’t exactly jam-packed even for a Sunday evening. Finally he came back and said that mutton seekh masala was available. So we decided to try that was well.

We also ordered some roomali rotis- which the kind waiter again mentioned is not available –we settled for some plain rotis and lacha parathas.

Again after quite some waiting, the food arrived and we dug into it with gusto – and tasted a mouthful of disappointment. 

Mutton seekh masala ( L) and Butter chicken (R)

 The butter chicken lacked any kind of flavour – I can safely say that it was the worst chicken dish I’ve ever had( including my initial cooking disasters) . The mutton seekh was pretty big in size but lacked any kind of flavour – I guess they just put the leftover seekh kababs into very chinesy gravy – I dunno which part of mughal kingdom the Chinese dishes came from!

The rotis were  good .

By now .we dint want to even attempt any of the desserts and got ready to leave. I think it was pretty obvious we were unhappy as the manager asked us the feedback. He promised me that it would be better in a month’s time but I don’t know if I would have the courage to go back and burn my wallet. S is not convinced and says if they were genuine they would have reduced some part of the really hefty bill.

The food is outrageously priced and below standard. The menu was sticky and had foodmarks on it. And the icing in the cake was the fly in my glass of water. Overall a huge disappointment!

  

Location - 4th floor, Opposite Shoppers Stop,3rd phase, JP Nagar, Bangalore

Price – Around 2000 Rs ( all dishes are around the 300 rs range )

Yum-O-Meter – 1/5 ( just for the laughs provided cos of the dressup and the rotis)