Sigh! It is a sad, sad day when a cherished food fantasy
bites the dust. The old Spiga at Vittal
Mallaya Road had captured my imagination as a
budding foodie, as a go-to place for great continental food. This is what
fuelled our visit tonight, a first after the shift to the current location on St. Marks Road .
The new Spiga it turns out has undergone a makeover, plonked
itself on a rooftop and now seems intent on joining the teeming horde of
lounges/pubs jostling for space in Bangalore ’s
nightlife. Spiga has a lot going for it in terms of ambience: a rooftop
setting, candlelight, comfortable seating, a view of UB City lights and Bangalore ’s incomparable
outdoor weather. It would have been perfect if I hadn’t been blasted from the
get-go by their loud and incongruously jarring house music. Honestly, I wish
these in-between lounge-restaurants would just make up their mind and be done
with it. I just find it so hard to drum up an appetite while being blasted by
irrationally loud dinchak music. Anyway, we were promptly seated, but our happy
spirits were not reflected in the dour-faced gentleman who refused to meet my
eye to take our order and came over only after much signalling and outright
hissing.
Since it was pretty late, we ordered for starters and mains
all at once. They have a pretty diverse menu, ranging from American burgers, to
English fish n chips to Mediterranean to Thai. We went with Satay prawns to
begin with followed by veg chimichangas for myself and rosemary lamb chops with
mushrooms and mashed potatoes for the husband. We were promptly given a little
tray of garlic bread: hot, buttery and crusty, it went down well and set a good
tone for the meal. I also asked for a lemon basil soda, which although
refreshing, had no hint of basil whatsoever, although I detected a bit of
ginger…unexpected and unasked for.
The prawns when they arrived were good for a loud, long
belly laugh. They were MINISCULE!! They looked so damn lost and sad and forlorn
as they sat in the plate skewered by the wicked wood picks. When we finally
stopped pointing and laughing and got around to eating them, we found them
pretty unremarkable. A standard sweet peanut marinade crowded out the flavour
of the mini-prawns. Sigh!
It’s practically impossible to go wrong with a chimichanga. Take
a burrito, stuff it with cheese and whatever’s at hand and dump it in the
fryer. Indeed, there was nothing very wrong
about my chimichanga, but it was just the little things that rubbed me the
wrong way. The burrito casing was terribly hard, a saw would have been helpful
in place of a dinner knife. As I worked my way though the dish, the measly dabs
of sour cream and salsa sauce lasted for only the first few bites, and I was
left to finish my dry, chewy chimichanga with congealed, unappetizing refried beans.
I saw no sign of the guacamole the menu had promised. I finally gave up when I
was three-quarters done. Sigh!
The husband was terribly disappointed with his dish of
rosemary lamb chops. The cuts of meat were just AWFUL, the ribs all running
together, and required gnawing like a caveman rather than using the steak knife
they offered. We had pictured a delicate dish of grilled lamb chops flavoured
with rosemary and other herbs. What arrived was a plate piled high with bad
cuts smothered in a standard pepper sauce with shallots, no hair nor hide to be
found of mushrooms or rosemary. I no idea pepper and rosemary could be used in
the same sentence. The mashed potatoes were grainy and contained onions….eeks!
The icing on the cake was the aged, fibrous beans they had added as an
afterthought to the plate. Sigh!
We couldn’t leave the place fast enough, never even
considered dessert. Such a sad end to a long-looked-forward-to meal.
Meal for 2 without alcohol: Rs. 1400
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