I was at a South Indian restaurant last night with my colleagues. The place looked decent enough..It was appropriately named too..the place was called Uduppi- after that home of all things flat and round and made of rice...
Now this was not the first time I had come to eat at Uduppi. I had had a not so pleasant experience the last time I went there. I had ordered for Vegetable Fried Rice and Gobi 65! Like my friend told me after the meal ( I had stated that the rice was too dry and that the Gobi looked like it had been welded together), what else could I expect after I ordered Chinese at a South Indian restaurant?? So this time, I decided to play safe and order normal South Indian food instead...
Idlis are the fastest to reach your table. So I ordered for a plate of idlis. And the Idlis lived upto their reputation of early birds. I got my order faster than my collleagues..But upon laying my eyes on what lay in the plate, whatever smile I had on my face disappeared...
Idlis are normally white..these were very much off-white.
Idlis are normally not very large..these were very very large.
Idlis are normally soft..these were so hard i could put them to lethal use (ok..so that one was a weee bit exaggerated).
I didn't have a good time eating it. So i had to order something more. It had been a very long time since I had had a plate of pooris. So I asked Waiterman to bring me a plate of Pooris. He nodded his head vigorously as if to say that it would reach my table in the next one minute.
One minute transformed itself to 20 minutes.
When finally it came, my Pooris were dripping in oil. If they had bones, my pooris would have been soaked to those bones. They didn't, but the oil was dripping from them nonetheless.I first tapped my pooris three four times. A few more drops of oil dripped from them. I wondered if I should perhaps squeeze the oil out of them. I tried. The two oily pooris started to crumble under my mighty squeeze. I had mercy on them and tried a more humanitarian approach. I borrowed tissue paper from my colleague and started wiping the oil away from the pooris. 5 minutes of cleaning paid off as I had a reasonably oil free but still glossy pair of pooris on my plate.
The owner of the restaurant was passing by. I beckoned him over and showed him my plate which had quite a lot of oil in it. I told him that the pooris had too much oil in them. I told him that i had managed to remove some of the oil with the help of tissue papers.
His response was: " Shall I provide some more tissue papers."
I looked back at him in disbelief.
He looks at me, realises it was a bad response, and mumbles something about things going wrong once in a while, and slowly, very stealthily, makes an exit from my table.
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