Restaurant review: Bricklane grill

Bricklane grill
The Escape Hotel, 12th Main, off 100 Feet Road,
Indiranagar
Call: 42415555
Rating:***
White furniture, lovely exposed brick walls, music that doesn’t make you feel too old and an ambience that will make a lot of restaurateurs jealous — Bricklane Grill at the Escape Hotel on 100 Feet Road Indiranagar has been on the radar of many Bangaloreans for a while. Why else would the place be running to a packed house week after week? This partially alfresco restaurant, with an indoor dining section on an upper level, offers grills, a smattering of European, Indian and Parsi food, without having a menu that’s too heavy to handle.
On my first visit there, which was quite accidental, I found myself in the middle of a Juke Box night the place plays host to; a stream of people of all ages thronged the place as we found it terribly difficult to get a table. The service was slow beyond belief — it took someone nearly 15 minutes to get the menu — and the food was just about average.
My second trip was just the opposite. The place was almost full, but not crowded, the servers were less rushed and therefore, in a better mood and they truly went out of their way to make sure all the tables, at least as far as I could see, got what they needed.
Beginning with a Mixed Grill Platter, which I have to say right away, was far from being decent. The marinades and sauces were fine, but the meats were tough enough to be used as marbles and the chicken was beyond dry. Later,of course, my dish was replaced by an original platter of the same, after I was informed that what I ate was the ‘sampler dish’. Surprising — this would probably be the first restaurant that served non-approved meat to a reviewer.
So — the ‘actual’ meat platter was a lovely surprise. The Jack Daniels Pork Chops, where the meat is marinated in Indian spices and quite a bit of JD is grilled to perfection; one can’t help but love the part-sweet and part-char-grilled flavours in the meat.
What was truly lovely is that they’re experimenting with the rogan josh in the kitchen — so the Jack Daniels Pork Chops have the usual cumin, garlic, star anise, and some smoked onions for its marinade and then some rogan josh sauce is added to it, lending a lovely sweet-spicy effect to the meat. And the way the pork lapped up the sauces, the result was quite exciting.
The chicken breast, grilled with garlic chutney, sadly tasted as if someone had wiped some garlic paste on to it. Such a big difference, when one uses crushed garlic pods and garlic paste on something grilled, especially when the chutney isn’t cooked!
If not for the Merlot Beef where the chef pours generous amounts of a Merlot into the marinade to break down the proteins of the beef, I’d have sulked for the rest of the evening.
A word about the beverage menu — they have really put in as much as one can in a good bar menu. So,there are different kinds of wines, spirits and some neat cocktails. I had a lovely mojito with green apple cubes and it was quite refreshing. Their cocktails aren’t sickly sweet in general, even though my second one, a fresh watermelon martini had strong overtones of sugar syrup. Incidentally, the city has a shortage of some liqueurs (Kahlua, for instance) so, some of the cocktails might not be available till supply is straightened out.
Wondering which way to go next, we began with a Poached Pear With Goat Cheese Salad and a Cedar Grilled Salmon with Star Anise Foam and the Sali Boti (from the Parsi section). The salad, to describe it in a very trivial word, was ‘blah’. There weren’t enough pear slices in it, one had to literally ruffle through a jungle of greens to find them and when you did, they weren’t poached quite correctly. The pears were crunchier than they should have been and the salad leaves were more on the bitter side. The salmon, which looked very pretty, was cooked just right, even though I wasn’t quite sure if the star anise foam does anything constructive to the dish or not. The fish, which was cooked to the right texture, didn’t taste as smoky as it could have been and that was one of the only things that troubled me about the dish.
However, the Sali Boti was an absolute treat and so were the desserts, something I’ll get to later.
Sali (matchstick potatoes) served on top of a boti (cubed meat) curry is as comforting as food can get — irrelevant of which cuisine it belongs too. This particular curyy is cooked with apricots, tomatoes, onions, green chillies, ginger-garlic paste, chilli powder, turmeric, a bit of vinegar (for the sour effect) and a dash of jaggery. Served here with chapattis, you can eat this curry with rice, as well. The meat was as tender as it could be and the lovely play of flavours, none of any being too overpowering, made everyone at the table happy.
As did the Filter Coffee Crème Brûlée and the Treacle Tart — the custard for the crème brûléedidn’t have any air bubbles, was beautiful to look at and eat. It’s served with a slice of biscotti that is baked in house and you have to use the biscotti to scoop some crème brûlée on to and then bite down on the biscuit — nice routine!
And the tart played an unprecedented and yet, perfect companion. Loaded with walnuts and some chocolate and served in a tart casing, it was sticky at the right places and melting in your mouth every few seconds to just give you a tiny ‘O’ every now and then — I could have eaten one more of those; or maybe two if no one was looking.