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THE RELUCTANT GOURMET
A new silk route
SHONALI MUTHALALY
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Asiana’s Silk restaurant needs to do more work on its Thai and South Indian cuisines
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PHOTO: R. SHIVAJI RAO
SOME OLD, SOME OFFBEAT FLAVOURS At Silk on the Old Mahabalipuram Road
The theme’s Thai, and the theme’s South Indian. There are statuesque Oriental vases, and Indian elephant statuettes. There’s a deliciously chic lounge bar, and an unnervingly kitschy grill restaurant. Asiana’s big. Asiana̵
7;s glitzy. But Asiana’s central theme seems to be confusion.
Set in Semmanchery, on the buzzing Old Mahabalipuram Road, currently burgeoning with slick offices and sleek buses crammed with IT professionals, besides soggy potholes and slack-jawed cows, Asiana is Chennai’s latest luxury hotel. With its dream location, and sparkling, vast interiors, it has all the odds stacked in its favour, even in these difficult times, where competition is rife and customers are divas. Yet, their speciality restaurant Silk has opted to try and please everyone, purporting to be Thai, all the while offering Murungaikai soup, and replacing the traditional bread basket with a pile of papads served with desi coconut chutney and Thai fish sauce.
Lot in common
The chef’s reasoning is both cuisines have a lot in common, namely coconut and spices. But considering both use spices in completely different ways, besides calling for vastly differing cooking techniques, what’s more likely is the fact that the hotel is playing safe.
While the Thai food adds a touch of much-needed exotica, and will appeal to more adventurous customers, whether they’re IT brats looking for ways to spend their hefty pay cheques or locals craving variety, the restaurant’s backbone will probably be its fish moilee and Mangalore chicken curry, ordered by the bulk of office goers in the area and curry-craving foreigners in the city for conferences and meetings.
As a result, Silk really has no real individual character, despite the fact that Asiana has painstakingly brought down three very capable women chefs from Thailand. The room, for instance, is pretty but looks like an average five star coffee shop, with marble floors, screens and a small stage, probably intended for live music performances.
The starters
The papad and chutney were followed by a collection of gorgeous starters: beautifully designed little sacks crammed with minced garlicky shrimp, skewers of succulent chicken satay served with a chunky sweet peanut sauce and breaded shrimp presented as delicate miniature birds, with tiny potato heads and beaks made of carrot slivers. (Though, it really creeped me out when their heads fell off mid-meal!)
The main course included stir fried chicken, crunchy with cashew nuts and moistened with a sauce featuring chilli paste and spring onions, along with a picturesque but unexciting Pad Thai, wrapped in eggs and served besides bizarre puddles of sugar, dry, pounded chillies and crushed peanuts. The grilled shrimp, set in a sweet sauce, was nice but like most of the other food, it lacked the subtle layers of flavours that make Thai food so distinctive.
While the chefs are undoubtedly good, judging by their presentation and the dishes they got right, perhaps they are used to smaller, cosier restaurants, and are still getting accustomed to the high tech, high volume cooking and unfailing consistency required in a fancy hotel kitchen.
The central idea, enabling you to eat a crisp dosa with green curry, is — to be perfectly honest — actually rather good, as anyone who’s put together a delicious late night refrigerator meal will know. But for that to work, Silk needs to get both cuisines right, focussing the big picture as well as taking care of the nitty-gritty.
Dessert, which was a magnificently presented martini glass brimming with chilled coconut milk and pretty pink water chestnuts, was a disaster because the coconut milk was awful, tasting suspiciously like it came out of a packet. Not the best thing to do when you’re charging Rs. 150 a dessert.
Yet, the service is good, the ambience restful and the menu intelligently features both old favourites, like tom yum soup and aattu kari rasam, and interesting offbeat items such as shrimp and pineapple rice or kozhi roll, spicy chicken in a pastry shell.
Silk can work. But first, it needs to know where it’s going.
A meal for two at Silk costs an average of Rs. 1,500. Call 044 67411000 for reservations.
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