Oct 30, 2003 11:37 AM
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(Updated Oct 31, 2003 11:10 AM)
Sheetal Samudra is about the last restaurant you hit just before Juhu Chowpatty on the corner. It used to be a fairly popular place in the nineties I think. I remember having eaten here way back in '93 or somewhere around that time and remember it to have been fairly good. Well, last night we had a guest from out of town and he wanted to eat at this place, though we were not that keen. Anyways, we drove the 15 minutes and got there. It was already past ten and there was no problem getting a place to eat.
Day visited : 29th Oct, 2003.
Ambience
The place has valet parking, so that's good. We got to the place, entered and sort of sensed that the place is old and has seen better days for sure. The seats are a little worn out now, the mirrors have stains of age, the floor air conditioners make more noise than cold. But these things are tolerable, I think. I would rather go to a place which doesn't really look good but the food is good than otherwise.
The place seems to get a mixed set of people. There was this gang of 7-8 Sikh gentlemen on side making quite a racket and enjoying themselves. There were a few family type groups as well. And there were some couples, down to earth and also foo foo (apologies, but you know the types with sunglasses in the hair at 10pm?) pretentious. So the perception was that the food would be good.
The place is a bit noisy and remained thus, though we sat here till late and we were at one of the two occupied tables. Maybe the traffic outside contributes to the noise.
Service
The service is not spectacular, but I must admit that it was attentive. The servers were polite and they genuinely wanted us to eat more and enjoy the food. They were attentive enough to rush to serve everytime we needed something.
The jacketed person who took our order did recommend particular types of food and described the flavours as well. He also recommended that we eat crabs, but our guest doesn't eat crabs and thus we had to let that pass.
Food
We had more of a prawns fest through the dinner actually.Along with some beverages, we asked for a serving of homestyle prawns. These were large sized prawn pan fried with red chillies (?). okay to eat I think, but smelled a bit which I guess fresh prawns should not. But the prawns were succulent and close to melt in the mouth.
We waited for a bit, and then asked for batter fried prawns with spring onions, jhinga samudra and steamed rice. The fried prawns were good sized, the bowl was full of sliced green chillies (gave me ulcers just upon sighting them) and small onions (not really spring onions). These ones did not smell, and were quite soft. Pretty well done except the chillies, I guess. The prwan samudra was more of an Indian style preparation somewhere between Malwani and your regular Mughlai, with a spicy red gravy. This was hot, quite hot. The rice was undercooked. It really bothers me when an eating joint doesnt know how to even make rice.
The taste of the food is sort of indifferent, the serving sizes are small. Usually siz prawns per dish. There were three of us, which leaves us with jut two pieces of prawns (and not huge ones) per person. So through the night I got to eat six prawns. Call that a prawn fest if you will.
Am I going back here? No. If I wanted to eat this and spend Rs 1800, I could go to so many other places, including Sheetal (not the Bukhara) in Khar or even to Mahesh in Juhu.
afterthought
I do appreciate that my stomach is not cast iron anymore, but it is not too delicate either. However, all of yesterday I have felt pukey and a few other things (which would be impolite to write here). Bottomline, the food has given me stomach trouble.
