Swaadhisht, Chander Road

I was admittedly drawn to this place while walking behind the lanes of Race Course Road (47 Chander Road, tel : 6392 0513) because I saw that there was goat briyani on the menu. The manager of the restaurant had stepped out to explain the differences between the regular mutton briyani which he mentions to use mostly Australian lamb and the goat variety which uses, well....goats from Malaysia which he also added was more expensive. I was sold right at the start since I wanted to try it.

We started off snacking on some onion pakora which were freshly fried while waiting for the rest of the food to arrive. These were pretty tasty and there were garlic chips among the pieces of battered onion. There was also a horrible corn soup with pitiful bits of canned mushrooms. I wouldn't have ordered them if not for being misled by the pictures on the menu. I didn't think that anything that had ingredients could taste so bland.


The malabar goat bryani which was $16 a portion didn't look very impressive. Or for that matter, the portions weren't very large neither. There are actually two versions of the goat bryani that were offered. The other one which is a Thallasseri version used a shorter grained rice from Kerala while this one used basmati. The flavour from the meat had also seeped into the rice from the cooking. I thought it tasted pretty much like any mutton briyani and wasn't particularly more robust as claimed. While it was pretty decent, I wasn't close to being wowed by it. I liked the raita though. Was delicious with the rice.


There was a need to supplement the dinner with something else on the side so here's a butter chicken which was loaded with chopped onions. This wasn't how I had expected the butter chicken to look like. But it was not bad at all. It had a bit of heat and was enhanced by those onions. I've yet to come across another rendition of this dish that has the same smoky aroma in the chicken like Jaggi's does.


Their gobi manchurian was not bad as well. Beside the surprisingly firm cauliflowers in batter, there were more chopped onions! Unfortunately, there was also little bit of ginger in there too. The rendition here deserves mention because of those firm and crunchy cauliflowers. Most versions of this dish has limp ones.


The restaurant gave us a complimentary after dinner sweet that seemed to be made of barley. I detected coconut and brown sugar in them along with cardamon amongst other spices.