Salt and Pepper (With a Lot of Spice!): Jewel of India

This post is courtesy a three hour buffet lunch I enjoyed thoroughly, thanks to the wonderful company I had!

Jewel of India located on the ground floor of the Nehru Center, in the heart of the city at Worli, makes for a fun and interesting dining experience on weekends. On weekdays, I have heard, it is full of employees of offices around (at least for lunch) and tends to be crowded. However, I went on a weekend and the restaurant was pretty decently crowded for a weekend and enjoyed the lunch.

The first thing that you notice about any restaurant is the ambiance of the place and Jewel of India scores well on this aspect. Warm colours, soothing paintings, plush seating, natural lighting (in the day at least) from a wall-sized window at a side with the food as the star of the show in the center.

The ambiance at Jewel of India

We started the meal with (no guesses for getting this one!) starters. The starters were an interesting combination of a onion bhajji chaat (onion pakodas served with dahi, imli ki chutney, teekhi chutney, corriander and sev), pani puri, mini dosas, fish fingers with a tartar sauce, lasuni chicken (boneless, melt in your mouth, garlicky chicken tikkas! yummmmmmmmmm!)

Onion pakora chaat

Pani puri... all ready to be dipped in spicy water and eaten!

The garlicky melt in your mouth chicken goodness!

After spending about an hour and a half on the starters (most of it on the chicken... because a hot new fresh irresistible batch had just come in) some conversations and some laughter, we managed to hold ourselves from the dessert table (I swear it was secretly calling out to me!) and moved on to the main course. The main course had some lovely meat and vegetarian gravies, meat and vegetarian biryani served with a basket of freshly made India bread (naan, methi parathas, roti) and baked bread rolls. I would recommend the creamy goodness of the methi matar malai (don't like peas but the gravy was out of this world!)

Indian bread basket

The plate full of Punjabi goodness!

And then finally (conversations aside) came the desserts! Such a wide variety to choose from. It was mango season (yes this post is THAT late!) so we had some mango crumble (though the mango was not deskinned properly and baking mango with the rest of the crumble kind of killed it for us!) a lovely chocolate pastry and another pineapple pastry (save it to be enjoyed last good! and I don't like pineapple really!), mousse, kulfi and last but not the least fresh fruit!