The Hungry Monkey - Restaurant Review

Monkey Business!

Have you ever eagerly anticipated meeting someone only to find out that your good looking date has a brain the size of a pea? Or that their outward showoff does not correspond with their actual abilities? Well, that was my experience at The Hungry Monkey, one of Delhi's popular restaurant cum bars last week. I'd been looking forward to going there for a while as it had been mentioned in some popular blogs as having exciting food. Apparently Californian twist to European food.

While the ambiance and music were pretty good on the terrace and it was a pleasant Friday evening to boot, the food was a different animal altogether. We ordered the secret agent chicken, baked Brie and slow roasted mushrooms for our appetizers of which the only dish worth commenting favorably about was the mushrooms which were pretty tasty. The Brie came wrapped in parcels of filo pastry which were quite tasteless and not very fresh but the accompanying raisin jam was good. The chicken lollipop style was OK though it had a little too smokey (almost burnt) kind of flavor and the meat from each lollipop would barely cover a fourth of your fork. That was the better part of the meal.

The entrees... Two slider dishes, one, a crispy chicken slider, which came with three mini burgers and three shot glasses of warm beer (don't know where they were going with that) was pretty much picked at with only the slider filling being eaten. The beer shots went to their natural resting place.. at the far end of the table, forgotten in its uselessness. The falafel slider, another set of three, also didn't get finished, and came accompanied by three shot glasses of Bloody Mary, which promptly joined the beer. Not good. Or maybe would have been appreciated by people who love tomato juice, so not judging that too much.

My seafood linguine, with literally three small to medium prawns, some calamari, topped by one dodgy mussel, which didn't seem to have been cleaned so well, was smothered in a fairly tasteless tomato sauce and liberally sprinkled with at least a bush of fresh rosemary, was seriously underwhelming and not to mention annoying. Am all for roughage generally but it really wasn't my ultimate culinary experience plucking out tough long leaves and sticks (yes those were also thrown in for good measure) of rosemary from my mouth with each bite of food. And at 695 rupees plus tax, the dish was so not worth it.

Imperfect Parfait

The dessert gets a special mention. By the time we finished our mains we were a bit hesitant to order any more stuff but being the hogs that we are, decided upon the white chocolate parfait, which was supposed to be accompanied by a Baileys/ Kahlua float and almond and vanilla filo pastry cigars. Come on, how wrong can you go with dessert, especially at a fancy restaurant? Seriously wrong, I can tell you. A jam jar held a white pasty filling that tasted of concentrated milk powder sauce, rancid filo pastry cigars and no Kahlua/ Baileys float. This was where they should have actually added the liquor. Not to the burgers! We returned the dish after two bites and refrained from ordering anything else, though the sweet potato pie with pecan praline sounded interesting.

Don't remember the last time I've been so disappointed by a restaurant - actually it was Monk at the DLF Place mall in Saket about six years ago. If the company was not so fun, it would have been pretty miserable. Maybe the chef was on leave that day, or they were just having an off day, because the service was not so hot either. Whatever it is, at 3000 rupees a pop, just good ambiance is not enough for a repeat customer if the food is not up to the mark. And the day we went, it wasn't.