I was invited by a business friend to review her restaurant client ; Soho St.

Soho St. is a multi cuisine restaurant that boasts of London like ambience and an international spread from 7 different cultures.
If you’re wondering what those 7 are; Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Mediterranean, Italian, Thai and Continental.

( If I were you, I’d grab some popcorn and then start reading this review, cos trust me, this is going to take a while!! )

The manager at the front desk was expecting me for lunch today. His name is Bijay Mallick. I was here with one other foodie friend. Bijay gave us a couple of seating options. The first looked like a specially created V-day table! The other option was a dimly lit setup. We chose the latter as it gave us easier access to the food! Plus, you could watch the Under 19 Cricket final on the projector 🙂

Coming to the ambience, I feel it’s extremely posh, if you compare this to the other buffet restaurants.

We started off with a chicken soup. The soup tasted great, but the preparation of the chicken was something that we didn’t like. It felt too raw, rubbery for our liking. No problems with the soup otherwise.

They had offers in wine(1+1), unlimited soft drinks. I didn’t have the courage to pick the wine today, after a Saturday night party 😉
We picked a soft drink each. After a couple of refills, we were asked if we’d like to try the lime sodas. They were nicely done, had little less of the fizz though.

Starters

The staff was kind enough to get a round of starters to our table. It had chicken teriyaki, basa grilled fish, chicken tikka, chicken seekh kabab. While the chicken seekh kabab was near perfect, the chicken teriyaki was unbelievably awesome 🙂

After the first round of the starters, we decided to take stock of what’s in the buffet. I then met the head chef, Mr Ashok, who was very humble. He walked us through the entire affair.

After our little chat with the chef, came some more rounds of starters!
They had done nice plating of each and every dish, which helps when you’re interested in clicking pictures 🙂

Here’s a 1 liner for each of them(Not quite 1 line) :

Paneer tikka: It was soft, had nice smoky flavor to it. It had the right mix of spices. Rating :4/5

Chicken Teriyaki: It was a little crisp on the outside and very tender on the inside. Try to have this when it’s hot 🙂 My fav dish in the starters 🙂 Rating: 5/5.

Basa fish : This is one of those common tandoor fish dishes you get at other BBQ buffets in Bangalore. I liked this one too. Rating: 3.5/5

Chicken seekh kabab: if you’ve had mutton seekh kababs, this is the chicken version of it. It’s no where near the mutton one, but it was really good. I think if the size of this was any bigger, it would have meant the chicken wouldn’t cook well. So, this was perfect. Rating : 4/5

Grilled Pineapple: I first saw this at Absolute Barbecues. So, I knew what this was, when the waiter got us a huge grill with pineapple. We got nice, thin slices. This was perfect, there was some sort of a layering on it, which made it crunchier 🙂
Rating: 5/5

Prawn in schezwan sauce: This was another brilliant dish, again brought on a separate plate. The taste was good, although the tail was cut, which other restaurants keep for aesthetic purposes. Rating:4.5/5

Babycorn Manchurian: This dish was unlike other restaurants where they make it crispy and hard. Here, it was just soft and good to taste. Rating:3.5/5

Aloo tikki: This dish we didn’t like one bit. Only thing good about it was it had some tangy chaat masala on it 🙂 The problem with this was that it was deep fried and the thickness of the tikki was too uneven( thick in the center and thin as you go towards the end). So the center was raw. I explained this to the head chef when he came to our table. Rating: 2/5

Chicken momo: This was a stuffed chicken momo, but very interestingly done. It was open on top 🙂 the size was just right for you to have it in 1 bite(unlike other momos, where you need 2 bites) , kudos to you guys!! Rating:4.5/5

Pineapple: Apart from the finely sliced grilled pineapple, we got diced pineapple. The sauce on this was green and tasted like mint. It was decent. Rating: 3/5

Cauliflower: this was a dish you could take a pass. The size was too big and didn’t quite appeal us with the taste. Rating:2.5/5

Overall, I would give the starters a 4/5 rating. They have some really good starters, with some decent ones, and a couple of poor ones.

Main Course

Head Chef Mr. Ashok walked me through the minute details of each of the dish in main course. He introduced to me a Spanish seafood dish named ‘Paella’ which is made with 4-5 different seafood meats and a spanish bomba rice. The chef walked us through how this dish is supposed to be sticky. They import rice just for this dish, unbelievable commitment 🙂
Rest of the dishes were quite common, which needed no explanation.
Bijay, the manager came to me and asked me to try the combination of white steamed rice with thai green curry.

Here’s a 1 liner of each dish:

Papdi chaat: This was decent, a little dry in my honest opinion. Rating:3/5

Dahi bhalla: i loved this. It was so soft and well cooked. Most dahi bhallas, will make you chew a lot, and would be under. This just melted in my mouth. I had 2 of these. Rating:5.5/5 (exceeded expectations)

Veg Thai green curry: this was a very nice and simple curry. I had this with steamed rice. It was perfect. Rating: 5/5

Paneer pasanda: i love paneer and I can be really judgemental about paneer. I liked this a lot. The shape was triangle, thin enough to have been cooked well. The gravy tasted very good. Rating:4.5/5

Sushi: I’m not a big fan of sushi. I did not like this. I had couple of bites, just to taste. I can’t really rate this too.

Mutton Keema with pav: love mutton keema and mutton seekh kabab. I dont eat any other mutton preparation. Since, the seekh kabab was missing here, I was eager to try this.
My friend is sort of an expert in meat and specifically in mutton. His take on this was that the lentil overpowered the mutton. For me, I think the combination of soft buttered pav and spicy keema was delightful. I had 2 bites of the pav, as I don’t take too much of gluten. Both bites were amazing. Rating:4.5/5

Chicken biriyani: we usually don’t get good biriyani in buffets. That’s a shame. But here, it was delightful. The flavour of the rice was amazing. They had little bit of fried onions, which I love as well 🙂 the chicken tasted good. Rating:4.5/5

Paella: This preparation had different seafood meats; Prawn, crab, lobster is what I remember. The rice was sticky and short. The dish tasted very wholesome. Rating:4/5

Mutton curry: this dish smelled real bad. I just wanted it out of my sight asap. The dish didn’t taste good for my mutton expert friend. I cant rate this.

Prawn curry: This curry was quite good. The taste of the gravy complimented the prawns perfectly. Rating: 4/5

Turkey: this was a pleasant surprise to us. I have never has turkey. This was the first time I had turkey. Chef Ashok personally cut slices of Turkey for us. It had a good jus as well. The other staff actually was struggling to cut it and that’s when Mr. Ashok came to the rescue. The meat is chewy, unlike chicken. For one bite, you’d need to chew 5x compared to chicken. Rating:3.5/5

Dal makhani: this was done well, although it didn’t have enough cream in my opinion. Rating:3.5/5

Veg Lasagne : this was presented beautifully to us. I had no clue what it was until I had 1 bite. We kept guessing what it could be. Some of the guesses were cheese, paneer etc. It was good with some heavenly cheese. Rating:4/5
Stuffed capsicum: i think this is the most underrated dish. It was so yummy that I was surprised how one could do it so well. Rating:5/5

There were few other dishes in chinese section. I didn’t try them.

I usually don’t take too much from main course, but today was different. I loved the main course here. Overall, I’d rate the main course a 4.5/5

Desserts

They have a decent variety in desserts, but I’ve seen better variety in almost all other top buffets in Bangalore. So, I was not really impressed with variety here. I was banking on taste to see if that could cover for it.

Baskin robbins : not sure why these guys have this. Didn’t try this as I wanted to have the teppanyaki ice-cream

Teppanyaki icecream : so you choose from 3 flavours; vanilla, strawberry and chocolate and make your own sundae. I picked vanilla, chocolate,added chocolate chips and chocolate sauce. Simple and delicious. No surprises here. The icecreams are not thick. Rating:3.5/5

Cotton candy: this is a hit with kids and girls alike 🙂 not a surprise that I didn’t have it. It’s also pink in color 🙂

Shrikhand: they had fruits in the shrikhand, which I didn’t like. The taste of the shrikhand was good though. Rating:3/5

Strawberry cheesecake. This was the pick of the day. It wasn’t exactly a cheesecake, but a soft pastry. The balance of the cake was perfect. Rating:6/5(exceeded expectations)

Phirni: you can give it a miss. Rating:2.5/5

Strawberry mousse: this was again very good. It shouldn’t have had the green tutti fruttis in them though, which spoils the smoothness of the mousse. Rating:3.5/5( get rid of the green thingy)

Jalebi: in the process of getting hot jalebis, we missed the part of resting the jalebis in the sweet syrup for long. In the end, the jalebis lacked the sweetness and the sticky-ness. Little unfair to rate this as it may be a one off case.

They had a few other things things that didn’t seem interesting.
I think the weakest section of food was desserts. Everything else was just perfect 🙂

Special mention to Chef Ashok, who spent so much time with me, on a busy Sunday afternoon. We spoke a lot about his past work and the places we both had in common, like the west coast in US and Jaipur. He’s done a good job here 🙂

I would like to congratulate the service team at Soho St. for a great service 🙂