Sattvam - A Vegetarian Delight

Sattvam is new and a distinctive restaurant, offering more than 75 varieties of sattvic food dishes including soups, shorbas, starters, salads, breads, rice, main courses with accompaniments and desserts in Indian and adapted world cuisines which is turning out to be a great food exploration among Bangalore vegetarians. The restaurant has both buffet and ala-carte but one way or another I found it puzzling to understand the ala-carte part of Sattvam because I could only interpret the place as buffet dedicated.

Sattvam is situated in Sadashivnagar off New airport road, Could not locate Sattvam identified as restaurant but its located just above Godrej Nature’s basket,

The interiors of the place are quite elegant, the seating area and cutlery adds to the fascination. The place offers an imperial experience that most mid-range restaurants these days fail to comprehend. They spend excessively but miss the mark to craft the mysticism.

Now let’s come to the food, as soon as you are settled; the soup and the starters are served on the table and as soon as you taste them; you know that this is going to be a fun ride,

The buffet spread is not ‘The longest Vegetarian Buffet’ or ‘The Biggest Buffet’ as others claim but it has limited dishes that do not compromise with the quality at all. I have been to many buffet places but always found quality a concern somewhere or the other, even in Barbecue Nation. Customer is offered 200 dishes but only 10 would make sense to taste buds. With Sattvam the dishes are right on money and everything is made with perfection.

The virtuous thing that Sattvam has done is that they have kept small cups that provide only a small serving at a time of anything and hence reducing the likelihood of any food wastage.

And last of all, the variety in dessert course is superior with refinement, pastries and cakes were very fresh. They were even considerate enough to offer Sugar Free Carrot Halwa with a very right extent of sweetness that my in-laws who are diabetic thoroughly relished.

Sattvam has reasonably decent seating capacity of about 140 people. But even with such large volume; the number of servers positioned is laudable. When we were there; it was a house full and for not even a second it felt that the place was mobbed or clogged or the service went from good to bad to worse. The service could well be comparable with that of Barbecue Nation (I am yet to see a restaurant matching service level of Barbecue Nation) but it was obvious that the man at work were under pressure. There were couple of instances where two different attendants dropped and broke the serving dishes because they were under tremendous stress to clean up hurriedly and were carrying back way to much cutlery then they can handle.

Last Thought:- Little Expensive for a vegetarian buffet but isn’t that bad knowing that Barbecue Nation is charging almost 800/- for vegetarian buffet !!

Here is my report card for Sattvam,

Price – 7/10

Taste – 8/10

Service – 8/10

Ambience – 8/10

Value for money – 7/10

Will I go back – Sure why not

Unlimited Pizza @ US Pizza–Last nail in the coffin

 

So here is the deal, how many of us know if there is another chain of pizzas that exists with the name US Pizza, I assume very less. In the times of Pizza Hut, Dominos and Pizza corner; US Pizza is trying hard to make its name known but getting nowhere. US Pizza outlets are located all around Bangalore, 13 of them apparently !! The one that I visited was located at 9th Block Jayanagar.

I personally love Dominos but what caught my eye was this enticing offer from US Pizza,

So I and my wife went for a brunch on Sunday to try out our luck with the Vegetarian offer. I read one review that said the service wasn’t great but food was good; experienced by a group of 4-5 bachelor guys. Still expectations were not high and we ordered 2 vegetarian unlimited pizza meals.

First Course was Salads, they have a complete salad bar with almost 10-15 different type of salads, dressings and fruits,

We tried almost all the salads in small bites and all of them were phenomenal for the price we were about to pay. And that led to a promising prospect to look forward to have something even better.

Then came the Soup, which tasted like salted tomato ketchup, it definitely wasn’t freshly made; to me it would have been perfect base for the Paneer butter masala gravy.

Next was the Garlic bread and Pizza,

So here is where all the beans were spilt, The garlic bread was good but the Pizzas were not so much. The problem was the crust and the issue was either of the following,

1. Either the Pizza base was old and hence was chewy, hard and dry, Or

2. They make a large size Pizza and serve a slice to everyone who opted for unlimited Pizza meal; they just heat up the leftover slices from previous batch made few minutes ago and serve again later.

So how much ever hungry you might be but will not enjoy more then 2-3 slices and might switch to Salads and Garlic breads.

Then arrived the last course, Brownie with Ice-cream, which was good for the money we paid,

First of all US Pizza is in no competition to Pizza Hut, Dominos and Pizza Corner but they are trying hard to get people with these kind of great deals BUT until and unless you do not provide and equivalent or superior quality; no one will return !!! The only thing I can think of is their targeted customers are college students and bachelors for whom quality is secondary !!

Here is my report card for US Pizza (Vegetarian Unlimited Pizza Meal),

Price – 9/10

Taste – 6/10

Service – 8/10

Ambience – 7/10

Value for money – 6.5/10

Will I go back – I don’t think so