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Break out The variety of the menu really shone through in the main course

According to Executive Chef Manoj Varghese, the primary aim of Zodiac is to provide value for money with a competitively priced but exciting menu with varied cuisine choices. The menu targets a variety of customers with its mix of continental, north Indian, south Indian and diet options with touches from the rest of the world, but still manages a fairly small, not overly confusing selection.

Thus, for starters we went from the cheesy herbed mushrooms to the lamb satay and finally to a selection of kebabs. The mushrooms, deep fried and stuffed with cheese and herbs made for a warm, melt-in-your-mouth start to the meal. The lamb satay that followed provided a nice gradient up to the kebabs with well restrained flavours. And the crescendo came in the form of the burrah kebab with an even, cohesive marination. Another unlikely winner was the badam palak tikki, with a generous spinach base that formed a stark contrast to the heady flavours of the non-vegetarian kebabs.

Of course, if we’d had a choice to finish up on just the starters alone, we might have picked some of the other interesting options like the nandu vada, deep fried crab meat vadas.

With all the flavours of the kebabs still reigning on our palates, the consommé Zodiac that followed, with juliennes of chicken, mushroom and lettuce, was an effective palate cleanser, and hence our choice over the minestrone and the mulligatawny on offer.

It was in the main course that the variety of the menu really shone through. On the continental side, there was a fairly well done cottage cheese and corn steak, although one felt the pesto was ground too fine. For those in our group with a liking for North Indian, there were more than serviceable preparations of the mutton roganjosh and the Amritsari fish curry. Disappointing though was the chicken tikka makhani, which neither hit home with familiarity nor excited with innovation. Bringing up the rear were the South Indian selections, the Chettinad chicken curry and the Malabar fish curry. Both fared better than the north Indian choices, with the richness of the coconut milk gravy in the fish curry forming a nice counterbalance to the raw heat of the chicken, both had with exceptionally fluffy appams.

And finally closing the meal was another regional specialty, the Gujarati combination of shrikhand and puri. It’s an interesting combination, with the sweetness of shrikhand toned down by the soft puris, leaving one with the feeling of not so much having eaten sweets as having enjoyed perfectly sweetened bread. Admittedly, Zodiac doesn’t score too many points on exotic value. But it does pick its strengths and does them rather well for the most part. And when you’re looking for a comfortable meal to unwind over, that’s a killer approach.

Zodiac is at Fortune Select Trinity Hotel, 134-136, Road No 1, EPIP Area, Whitefield, and can be contacted on 40200200/50.

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