Recently I happened to visit two restaurants which have tried to carve a niche among the crowd of multi cuisine restaurants. In fact, I visited them for the fact and hoped they will have something nice and different on offer. The restaurants in view are "Egg Factory" on St. Marks Road and "The Urban Nawab" on Outer Ring Road, Marathalli. (Both in Bangalore)
Since food is very subjective and I am sure many people might differ from my opinion, I would like to mention a bit regarding my food preferences so that people can determine whether the same opinion holds any relevance to them or not.
I am a north Indian and naturally that is the most preferred cuisine. However, having been so long in south, I almost devour on idli, dosas, appams as well. I strictly avoid continental except chinese food which I should say is very much Indianized in most of 'chinese' restaurants. Having been to Taiwan, I am sure I wouldn't like truly chinese version. This is to emphasize the fact that I don't use words like "exotic" and "interesting" for "different" food. It's just good or not good for me.
So, these two restaurants aren't continental for sure. One claimed only egg based menu and since I love every dish that has anything to do with egg(Egg biryani, Egg fried rice, Egg noodles and ofcourse Omlette), I had to visit it once. Delighted that all the above mentioned items were in menu indeed but with a caveat. Every dish had a warning "our style". Though obviously we didn't think of it as a warning at that point of time. Wasted no time in ordering a sample of everything as we were in a group.
The look itself of every dish we ordered was "tell tale". Outright disappointing. Biryani, even egg curry wasn't good at all. Finally as a last option to bring back our taste sensors alive, we ordered Omlettes as we thought probably our style also wouldn't do as much harm to simple omlette. And we were right this time. Thank god for that. Well, the place itself is usually crowded but I think mostly people go there for light meals (Omlettes etc). So, I think it's avoidable if you plan to fill in.
The other restaurant "The Urban Nawab" looked a bit safer option since it claimed to offer Awadhi cuisine, basically north Indian. However, this restaurant may have already disappointed countless others like me and that's why even on a friday night, it was completely devoid of customers. The eatery has pre set menus and so your options are very limited. Out of that also, they didn't have one "supposed to be specialty". Then I had to order veg biryani only. It wasn't bad but it and the overall ambience wasn't worth its price tag. At same price or less, you can have a chhole aur aloo dum biryani in Jalsa further ahead on outer ring road and it's divine in comparision.
So, an advise of caution to people who may get attracted to these specialty restaurants which in fact, have nothing special to offer except the idea.
