Chef at Large

Meeting with some long lost friends, their parents, their children and so on, we landed up at Fortune Cookie on Friday night.

It’s a nice place really - the owner is an ex-shippie who has ransacked his house and placed all his collected oriental artifacts in the restaurant. Decorated with an overpowering shade of red, The Fortune Cookie has a pleasant ambience and is a nice place to visit.

I remember the last time I was there. They have this tall, lanky waiter who has some kind of a language problem, or is it IQ. Out of the many things we ordered, one was lamb in black bean sauce. It went something like this:

Me: … and I’d like a lamb in black bean sauce
He: Black bean sauce?
Me: Yes, black bean sauce
He: You want lamb in black bean sauce.
Me: Thats right.
He: Not, the shredded lamb in hot garlic sauce
Me: No, I want the lamb in black bean sauce
He: Not hot garlic sauce.
Me: Yes, not hot garlic sauce

You must believe me. It actually went like that, till I asked him to please can it and call someone else to take my order. This time too, there was an equally tall, but different chap, who managed to repeat my order 5 times, in 5 different ways till I had to ask him to please ask someone else to come… and who should he send… the previous tall chap of ‘lamb in in black bean sauce’ fame. He must have sensed something was wrong based on my frantic gesticulations, reddening of the face and bulging eyes or was it the hoarsely rasped ‘not you, anyone but you’ - whatever it was, he rapidly backtracked and sent another chap, who did it right the first time.

This time, we stuck to much cliched items - chicken sweet corn soup, vegetable sweet corn soup, clear chicken soup with noodles, chicken lemon and coriander soup, vegetable lemon and coriander soup, lamb in black bean sauce (yeah, i like this one), brocolli and baby corn in soya garlic sauce, vegetable rice, vegetable noodles and chicken noodles. As I said, the food was cliched but then so was most of the menu. Going by that kind of food, given sufficient MSG, soya and vinegar, you really can’t go wrong. Therefore, most of the food tasted good. We did order a bottle of beer, a few lime sodas and a brandy too.

The damages: INR 3,500 for 5 adults and 3 children - not bad.

Try it out - they aren’t adventurous, but what they have isn’t bad and you’ll probably go back a second time.

- Sid

You may also like these posts:

• Review: Superstars, Sector 18, NOIDA
• Review: Kebab Krazy, Sector 18, NOIDA
• Review: Republic of China, Great India Place, NOIDA
• Review: Papa Johns, Sector 18, NOIDA
• Sidewok - Khan Market, New Delhi