Something’s Fishy

Something’s Fishy

In the welter of buildings that have sprung up over the last few years in Sector 30, Vashi, one of the newest is the Tunga Regency, all cement and blue glass.
This magazine told me to wander over and pick one the three restaurants to review. The choice was easy: Café Vihar, the vegetarian place, was overrun with noisy brats, partly open-air and looked like a food court in an amusement park mall, not a restaurant. This writer scuttled off quickly, in search of ACs and peace.
We started off at Crimson, the coffee shop, whose signage beckoned with promises of spirits, coffee and grills. It was a dry day, so we sipped a fresh lime soda (Rs 45) and a chaas (Rs 55) while we sniggered at the typos and fractured English in the menu. For what at first glance looked to be a quiet, subdued haven, Crimson was noisy. Not because it was full or patrons were yelling, but because of sheer bad design. The constant clatter of cutlery, every movement and word is preserved and amplified echoed through the room. I’m notoriously cranky about those things (“ossified old curmudgeon,” my politer friends say), so I checked with my dinner companion, younger, more tolerant, more inclined to smile. Nope, it wasn’t me. The place gave her a headache, she said. The food on offer seemed uninviting, so we decided to head next door to eat. To do so, we had to step through the hideousness that is the atrium (imagine the inside of a jukebox) into the even noisier Something’s Fishy.
The interior motif here is glass and silly curtains dangling coyly a third of the way down from the ceiling, and the tables are jammed way too close to each other. The senior waitstaff wear pinstripes and gold braid. ’Nuf said? And the acoustics are even worse here, or perhaps it’s the number of yelling toddlers gambolling in the aisles.
The name leads one to expect seafood. But there is something black in the lentil soup. Like the presence of lentil soup. Because the place is multi-cuisine, with Indian (when a restaurant in India does that, one, um, wonders), Chinese, Malvani, Mangalorean and Goan food. Pushy waiter wants our order before the chairs were warm. He is twice dismissed. When we’re ready to order, the first three items we choose aren’t available. The place being new, he confides, it hasn’t started preparing all the items on the menu. The baby at the table to the left has started to bawl, and from the one just below (our miniature table is on a raised sort of gallery at the back), a brat shows signs of wanting to stick his fingers in my water. We order before our appetites vanish, staying with the marine section of the card, and then attempt to converse through the din.
My Crab Meat Soup (Rs 125) arrives, and it is swimming with capsicum and chillies, which effectively smother all taste of crab. Gah. I do so love crab. Comes the main meal. The Kolambiche Ambat (Rs 350) is lovely. The prawns are succulent, the gravy has a mild bite, and goes well with the steamed rice (Rs 95) that has taken the place of the appams and neer dosas that they don’t make yet. The rice sets of the Tesereya Ani Batata (Rs 195) as well; the gravy’s spicy without taking the roof off of your mouth, but alas, the potato chunks easily outnumber the shellfish morsels.
Verdict: fair enough if you live in Vashi and want to try out a new place, but hardly worth the trek from any other part of town.

Something’s Fishy, Tunga Regency Hotel, Plot 37, next to Centre One, near Vashi Station, Sector 30 A, Vashi, 400703 - Mumbai. Phone: 66801818. Meal for two, without alcohol, Rs 1200 - 1500. Service charge and VAT charged over the bill.

Published in Time Out Mumbai, XXth XXXX, 2006.

Tags: Time Out, Mumbai