Sundays have become brunch days. Most people want to spend their Sunday afternoons chilling with friends over a good meal and relaxed ambiance. Especially after Saturday night’s drinking and debauchery. That explains the popularity of the Sunday brunch concept in the city. And so many restaurants cropping up with Sunday brunch buffets. The latest one I tried was D’Bell at Lower Parel.
D’Bell is situated inside the posh One Indiabulls Center, and it is quite a maze to get to. I had to encounter two security checks, a long trek through a parking lot and an endless wait for an elevator before I finally made it. I guess I took the back entrance but they definitely need more signage put up considering the number of restaurants in that row. This long walk surely worked up my appetite.
The interiors are fun and cheery. They have walls with assorted music and movie posters framed. Then there was this blackboard displaying the menu for today’s brunch. I personally loved these shelves filled with books, knick-knacks, souvenirs and this adorable tiny television. My favorite corner of the room.
Everyone loves pizza. And everyone loves surprises. And when the two get somehow connected it’s guaranteed to get everyone excited. So when a bunch of food bloggers were invited for a surprise launch one evening at Pizza Express, Colaba we were all thrilled. Few of us would not only be spending an evening sampling some scrumptious pizzas, but also be the first to know the secret. My mind went crazy thinking about the possibilities. Was it a new product launch or a new store launch? Or the start of a new campaign? Only time would tell…
Now I’m a huge fan of Pizza Express. I remember travelling frequently to Colaba when they had just launched for my share of pizza and cheesecake. Luckily they have expanded with outlets in BKC and Andheri too. So I’m never too far from my favourite cheesecake in the city. In my opinion, they’re one of the best value-for-money Italian restaurants in Mumbai. So I made sure to trek to Colaba for ‘The Big Launch’ at Pizza Express inspite of being down with a flu on the previous day. All for the love of food (and cheesecake)!
It was a packed house that evening. All of us excited to find out what the big surprise was. We were introduced to the existing ‘Summer Special’ menu and would be eating some of the dishes from there.
Head Pizzaiolo Shri then arrived to speak to us. A pizzaiolo is a pizza chef, the guys who wear the black and white striped t-shirts at the restaurant. To become a certified pizzaiolo at Pizza Express, one needs to go through 12 weeks of intense training. He then proceeded to give us some insight about the restaurant. The Pizza Express franchise comes to us all the way from the United Kingdom with branches all over Europe, Hong Kong, Middle East and now is in India!
He took us on a tour of the restaurant. We got to see the pizzaiolos in action, flipping pizzas around. Not as easy as it looks! Shri also pointed out the Rudyard Kipling quotes placed strategically at various spots in the restaurant and parts of the submarine placed on the ceiling. I’ve never paid attention to these details before.
Shri Giving Us Some Gyaan
Pizzaiolos Hard at Work
These Beauties Are All Ready To Get In The Oven
Pizzacrobatics
Finally the huge secret we were all waiting for was revealed to us. It was the launch of the #YearLongPizzaTrip campaign. We all love clicking pictures of our food and then uploading them on Instagram, right? What if I told you doing that could get you free pizza for a year? Just upload a picture of your favorite dish at Pizza Express, write a brief review of the dish, and use the hashtag #YearLongPizzaTrip. Don’t forget to tag the @PizzaExpressIn guys. The pictures with the maximum likes wins free pizza for an entire year. Un-frikkin-believable!
Now it was time to sink our teeth into some yummy food. The starters started to arrive. First came the Polpette- chicken meatballs in chicken Bolognese sauce with fresh parsley, served with dough sticks. This was one of my favorite dishes of the night. The meatballs were succulent, delicious and was complimented perfectly with the tangy Bolognese sauce. We wiped the sauce off the plate with the breadsticks later.
Polpette
As we waited for more food to arrive, the staff kept us entertained with a quiz about Pizza Express. We were divided into teams of four and the team with the maximum correct answer won prizes. And they also got to reveal the campaign poster. Best prize of them all! We also tried our hand at juggling artificial pizza dough. Some of us were naturals, some of us not so good. But such a fun game that kept us in splits.
The Baked Mushrooms were next. These are button mushrooms filled with mozzarella, pesto and pesto rosso, and served with dough balls. Now imagine mushrooms, coated with their famous pesto sauce and then enveloped in cheese. Yummy!
Baked Mushrooms
I was sipping on a Berry Fresca cooler as I gobbled my food down. A fun, summery, berry flavored drink.
Berry Fresca
The Polpette Bolognese is the new pizza included in the summer menu. It has chicken meatballs with chicken Bolognese sauce, jalapeno peppers, mozzarella, and rocket leaves on top. I’m not a fan of rocket leaves on my pasta. Salad and pasta are two separate, beautiful entities and should not be mixed. But I actually liked the combination here. I just wished the pizza had been a tad bit more saucy.
Polpette Bolognese
The Risotto Pollo Funghi, as the name suggests, was a risotto made of portobello mushrooms, chicken, pesto and parsley topped with rocket leaves, shaved emilgrana. Anything with pesto and I’m a fan. This was a lovely risotto which was not overdone with cheese unlike most risottos in the city.
Risotto Pollo Funghi
The dish I was most looking forward to taste was the Farfelle con Salsiccia which had farfelle pasta cooked in a white wine and cream sauce, with pork sausages and rosemary. The pork sausages were delicious, unfortunately that was the only thing I liked in this dish. The pasta was sadly undercooked. Most restaurants overcook pasta making it too soft such that the pasta is no longer ‘al dente’. I think these guys in wanting to not overcook the pasta, ended up undercooking it.
Farfelle con Salsiccia
And they saved the best for last. My main reason for visiting Pizza Express has always been the cheesecake. The best cheesecake in the city in my opinion. Feel free to tell me your favorite.
We had a delicious Mango Cheesecake that night. Fine pieces of alphonso inside the classic cheesecake. Absolute beauty she was! And unlike most restaurants that serve cheesecake with cream, they serve it with their in-house vanilla icecream which is yummy by itself. I enjoyed this summery dessert, wish it had more mango pieces though.
Mango Cheesecake
We then ordered another round of the mango cheesecake. And we weren’t done yet. Classic Cheesecake toh banta hai boss! It is a ‘classic’ for a reason, because nothing can beat the original.
Classic Cheesecake
We downed three cheesecakes between four people, but it was worth that extra kilo I put on.
Such a fun, foodie event this was. Pizza Express remains one of my favorites in the city. And the fact that they’re sending some lucky few on a #YearLongPizzaTrip adds some major brownie points in their kitty.
(As I type this, my friend Harsh aka MumbaiFoodLover has won himself free pizza for a year. Are you next?)
Eating lunch at work becomes such a hassle for me sometimes. Some days I leave home too early in the morning to be able to take a dabba. Eating in the canteen becomes pretty monotonous since its hospital food at its best. Ordering in everyday turns out to be expensive and time consuming. So I was looking for a dabba service for lunch since a long time.
I knew about the Foodees Tiffin Service since a while since I’ve been following them on twitter and even visited their website once or twice. I’ve been wanting to try out their food but hadn’t got around to doing so. As luck would have it, I won a twitter contest they conducted recently and got to try out their tiffin service for lunch for a week. Woohoo!
On a Saturday prior I got a mail mentioning the entire menu for the following week. I had to undergo the tough job of deciding what I wanted to eat on which day. Mouth was watering already! They offer a number of set meal options from salads, sandwiches to Indian Veg/ Non Veg meals to continental Veg/Non Veg meals. I decided to try all that they offer.
One of my favourite food quotes. And so apt to introduce this blogpost. Because this is not just about eating sushi but also making it.
The food bloggers were recently invited to BusaGo at Lower Parel for a fun sushi making MasterClass where renowned chef Nikhil Chib would be teaching us. Here we could make our own sushi and eat it too! The best tasting sushi would then be put on the menu at BusaGo, Lower Parel for the entire month of July. We all reached the venue the allotted Saturday afternoon and sipped on sangria while we waited for the class to begin. They brought out the sushi making ingredients and the shutterbugs went crazy clicking pictures even before we knew what the ingredients were.
Talk about malls and shopping in Mumbai and one name comes to mind: Phoenix! The one at Lower Parel and the younger sibling who resides at Kurla are both landmark shopping and most importantly food destinations.
With our emphasis to explore the food options that Phoenix Marketcity, Kurla has to offer the food bloggers set out on a Food Crawl. We were looking forward to this fun evening that the guys at Phoenix Marketcity in collaboration with Food Bloggers Association of India (FBAI) had organized for us. Well I’ve done food crawls and bar hops before, but nothing inside a mall. So this was going to be different indeed.
Destination I: The Irish House for drinks, cocktails, and appetizers.
I love The Irish House having been to the other outlet at Lower Parel before. It’s such a fun place to chill with friends and grab a drink.
