We have a young friend who is a real foodie. But he is particular about what he eats. He has no interest in anything that grows on soil — what he likes is all that moves on soil. So if you give him chicken tikka or mutton burrah, he will be happy. The only time he is willing to accept a plant is when it grows rice or wheat, so that the former can be mixed with meat for biryani, and the latter turned into a juicy roll.
But life is not a bed of roses (as the wise man said). The young friend’s parents have been trying to put him on a diet for obvious reasons. So whenever he meets me, he complains about the bottle gourd or pumpkin that his dad has been eating (and which, the family expects, he’ll eat too).
When he dropped by earlier this week, he looked so woebegone that I thought I had to do something about him. He himself opened the conversation by plaintively asking for some kulchey-chholey. Once he had demolished them, we went to Mehar Chand Market to pick up a present for a relative. And while I was there, I suddenly spotted a bright yellow shop. Tikka Corner, it said in bold letter.
I had been keeping tabs on this shop for a while. It had been coming up when I was there some weeks ago, and I found that Tikka Corner belonged to the Old World Hospitality group, which runs Chor Bizarre and all the restaurants at the India Habitat Centre.
How to reach The takeaway, I learnt, had opened in January. The address is 8, Mehar Chand Market, Lodhi Colony (Phone: 8800118118), and it has branches in Pune, Lavasa and Gurgaon, and at the DLF malls in Saket and Vasant Kunj.
I liked the look of it. Apart from the bright colours, there were some eager young men at the counter, waiting to assemble your rolls. The place serves kathi rolls (Rs.109-139), pocket parathas (Rs.109 or Rs.129), Value Meals (rajma chawal, chicken curry and rice and so on) for Rs.129 to 199. Tandoori platters – serving anything from paneer and soya tikkas to malai tikka and kakori kababs – are for Rs. 199-249. You can also get a thali there or Hyderabadi biryani.
I had asked for rolls – and what interested me were the fillings that went into them. You get the usual tikka rolls, but you can have a roll with a filling of bhuna gosht (Rs.139) or Kashmiri rogan josh (Rs.139). If you want a single layer of egg added to this, you have to pay another Rs.10.
The rolls are assembled with care – the chunky mutton pieces are coated with slivers of green peppers, onions, beet root and carrots, along with some peanuts. Then you can choose what kind of sauce – garlic, mint or chillies (or all three)—you want drizzled over it. And then the roomali is neatly rolled and presented to you.
The rolls are indeed very nice. The meat filling is spicy and tasty, and the casing is soft. Our young friend had a bhuna gosht roll (I had asked for a chicken tikka roll for him, but he very politely changed the order). Since he thinks he wants to be a food critic, I asked him how it was. “Bahut umda hai (it’s great),” he said.
I just hope his bottle gourd-eating father is not going to read this.
