I took a walk around the guest house a couple of days back and came across a restaurant called A Breeze. Seriously. It had an A in the name. Like an initial or something. Like the A in my name stands for my pop’s name. That kind of an ‘A’. Very odd. Why the article? Why couldn’t they leave it at Breeze? Is it a style of numbering, perhaps? If it is, then the third one in the series would have a cool name. C-Breeze! Get it? As in sea breeze off the coast aaand.. as usual, I digress. I walked over to the place and got a good look around.

They had a Shawarma grill going strong and a Grilled Chicken set-up in place and the place looked pretty busy with people crowding around the counter waiting for their orders to-go. I chose to eat there and got myself a table. They stuck a pretty detailed menu card under my nose and I spent a good ten minutes going through it. Their Non-veg mini Thali was advertised all over the place and I saw a bunch of people ordering it, so I decided to get one too. The food took its time getting to me but when it did show up, I was pleasantly surprised.

There were three different kinds of chicken – Chicken Varuval, Murgh Makhni and Chilli Chicken. The Varuval was excellent – well spiced with a solid dose of black pepper – and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The Murgh Makhni was a little sad, but in all fairness, I’d just returned from Delhi the previous day, so I still had a vivid memory of the real stuff lingering around at the back of my mind; telling me that the dish I was flirting with, was a fake – a shamefaced tramp in a cheap orange gravy that only wanted me for my money and nothing else. I guiltily hurried through my portion of the pseudo Murgh Makhni and made an imaginary promise to the fictional real Murgh Makhni in my head, that my tryst with the pseudo Murgh Makhni was a one time thing and it meant nothing to me. But seriously, the gravy seemed really off and obviously had potato and corn flour added to give it body. Not cool. This must be the padded bra that the real Murgh Makhni had referred to during her angry tirade. Anyway, in my book, adultery may be a sin, but adulteration is even worse!

Moved on to the Chilli Chicken. Now this is a dish, that is different in every part of the country. Some places use green chilli, some use red, some places make it with a desi-Chinese twist and some places make whatever the f*ck they want. The variations are endless. A Breeze turned out a very nice dish, with red chilli powder and vinegar being the predominant flavours. They also had some sliced onion chucked in there. Understandably, a win in my opinion. If you don’t get why that would be a win for me, please go back and read the URL of this site.  😛

I started on the ghee-rice  next. One thing I’ve noticed after coming to Bangalore, is the presence of this item on the menu at every single place I go. It seems very very popular, and rightly so. The ghee rice that A Breeze served me, totally rocked. I polished off the whole thing and paid a hundred and twenty bucks for it all. Forgot to mention that the thali also included a couple of rotis, some dal and some pickle. Although this was a fairly luke-warm experience for me, its safe to say that I won’t be going back to A Breeze any time soon. I actually went there the next day as well and decided to get a couple of Shawarmas to go and thats when it happened. I also got some grilled chicken, but it really isn’t worth a mention. The Shawarmas though, NEED to talked about.  I’m gonna drift off topic a bit now, but do stay with me. Its going to help elucidate my point.

There was a time when nobody thought that Batman could be hurt, let alone defeated. He was impervious to pain and had vanquished foe after deadly foe with his unique combination of intelligence, steely will and physical conditioning. Then, in 1993, DC released a comic book (unfortunately named Knightfall), in which they introduced a character named Bane. Freakishly strong Bane, broke Batman’s back and left him critically injured for over a year. Batman would fight another day, but in the meanwhile, all hell broke loose! The earth tipped to one side, and nothing was the same any more. All the oil slid to the other side of the world and Dubai was f*cking pissed as hell! Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is, something that had never happened before, well.. happened. I got an upset stomach.

The lousy Shawarmas I picked up from A Breeze took me out of action for two whole days. Now, I’ve eaten bad food before, but never has the old soup tureen been knocked over in such a violent manner while one was reaching for a bread-roll. My solemn advice to you is, eat at this place if you dare, but don’t even think of ordering the Shawarma. It is bad food that will make you sick.

Much like Batman, I marked the incident down to experience and vowed to return with a vengeance, but looking back on my interesting and slightly gaseous weekend, I’ll say this much – A Breeze sure as hell whipped up a Wind in the Willows! I’ve come to the end of this post and only just noticed that I’ve ended up assigning a character to each of the things I touched upon – from the jealous female Murgh Makhni, to the villainous Shawarma and finally my heroic stomach – Batman. Interesting. I should make a script out of this and sell it to Bollywood! I’m confident that A Breeze – the film, will be quite the pot-boiler!

Over and out! 😀