Sunday Mall Madness

Mall of India, Noida

At first glance this could easily be mistaken for a railway station - a really posh one- at rush hour right? It's actually the food court in Noida's new Mall of India on a Sunday afternoon. This is the mall I've been waiting for, for years and apparently so has every other resident in the city and neighboring districts of Uttar Pradesh.

Before the Mall of India, the city had very few good dining, shopping and entertainment options and one would have to travel miles away to those in Delhi's Saket or Vasant Kunj or even cross two state lines to get to Gurgaon. The only mall of consequence, The Great India Place, about whose food court I went on a rant a couple of years ago, stopped being much good after the initial few years of its opening.

Now, with 2.7 million square feet of stores, restaurants and gaming, we need to look no further. The mall has well known brands like Zara, Marks and Spencer, the largest H&M in the country, Forever 21, Cole Haan, Gap, Hamley's and stores such as Armani Exchange are also on their way to opening their shutters. The shops also have large floor areas thereby giving customers a wider range of merchandise. 

It's also entertainment bonanza for the kids. The top floors have movie theatres, Fun City, a play centre for Kids with bumper cars, some rides and gaming options and Smaash, a gaming centre where you can hit cricket balls against a virtual opponent, play soccer, go bowling and have scores of video games to burn your money on. The piece de resistance though, is Ski India, the country's biggest snow park where you can go bob-sledding, tobogganing, tubing or just jump around in the snow. The lines for this place are unbelievable and if you don't come early on a weekend, there's little chance you'll even get to go in.

Now all these gaming areas are accessed through the food court. So, even though it is India's largest, with a 1,000 people seating capacity, on a Sunday, it was totally inadequate and practically bursting at the seams. There were easily three times the number of people the hall could accommodate and it took us two hours to get our food. We had planned to get lunch before the Angry Birds movie which started at 12.15 p.m. and decided on the food court as everyone wanted to eat different cuisines. Alas, being Sunday, we got lazy and missed the opportunity. So by 2.30 pm, when we emerged from the hall, it was madness. There were no tables free and people were hovering over occupied ones with a hawk eye ready to grab the seat as soon as their occupants finished.

Waiting for a table standing to one side with the two brats I was pleasantly surprised when in a few minutes a gentleman approached me and pointed to the table his family was vacating. Another lady from behind dumped her bag on the seat and was categorically told by his wife that the table was going to us. How sweet of them. It was nice to experience kindness from random strangers. I thanked him profusely.

Chairs are a premium. While the hubby was getting the food I was approached by at least 10-12 people who were polite enough to ask if the chair was free. One woman didn't even bother. She just grabbed hold and started taking it away. The `hey! someone's going to be sitting here' stopped her. How uncouth some people are. You get to experience all kinds of people in a crowded place.

In the two hours it took us to get the food - my husband and I took turns - one chair got swiped by someone which we managed to replace. Then the hubby saw a little boy holding an even smaller boy protectively on a table without any chairs while the mother went to get food so he gave him one of ours. He's a nice guy that way. Very generous in thought and deed. We got another chair soon after.

I don't see the rush abating in the near future as we are heavily dependent on malls for entertainment for at least seven months of the year because the scorching sun makes outdoor activity near impossible during the summer months. At temperatures ranging from 40 - 47 degrees Celsius only the very brave would go out gallivanting in parks and open spaces. We make full use of them in winter though. The developer of the mall has hit a gold mine and is well set for a good number of years before he sees any likely competition.

While in my earlier post I lamented about the quality of fare at Great India Place, this mall has no such issues. The range at the food court is large and the quality good. Dining options range from fast food such as Dominos Pizzas to KFC and Rolls King selling Kathi rolls to oriental options like Kylin and The Bento Cafe, which sells pretty good Asian food in box combinations including Malaysian black pepper crab, prawns in sriracha sauce and duck in tamarind sauce with fried rice or Japanese chilli udon noodles or Thai noodles. It's not cheap and the portions are small but the food is good. It's early days yet. Lets hope the quality remains the same and the standards don't go down. Right now I'm happy to have quality food and entertainment in my backyard.

Gourmet Meals on Wheels - Napa Valley Wine Train

Napa Valley Wine Train and Grgich Hills Winery

Some years back, I watched a program on the Travel and Living channel about the Napa Wine Train. They spoke about the overhauling of its rail cars, the route it took, the carefully crafted multiple-course dining menu and the places it visited, and I thought to myself, how nice it would be if I could experience that. And last November, I did.

There are quite a few options to explore Napa and its wineries. You could hire a chauffeur driven car or a limousine - they get as fancy as you want -or you could take guided tours, or rent a bike or hire a car and drive yourself. The latter would not be advisable for, after a few tasting sessions, your senses start to get a bit woozy and it would be a problem if you get caught driving under the influence. Same with the bikes. For the serious wine aficionados to make the most of Napa, you need to stay for a few days and leisurely tour as many wineries as you can. As we had only one night there, we decided to go for the Napa Valley Wine Train, which is highly recommended all round and since I was the only really enthusiastic wine drinker among the lot, a tour of one winery was more than enough. Also, it was our friend's 40th birthday, so that made it special. 

Chugging Along the Country Side

With much excitement we got on the train with its refurbished Pullman rail cars at 10.50 a.m. and were promptly directed to our dining car for our meal. If you read my previous Napa post on Hennessey House you'd know that we would have just stuffed our faces with a rather large breakfast less than half an hour before. The thought of lunch immediately after, was a bit horrifying, so we asked if we could eat our lunch on the way back after the winery visit. They very kindly agreed and we were directed to the lounge a few coaches down and just as we were about to get comfortable, we were told that we had to go back to the dining car as that was the only option for those that had chosen the single winery visit as opposed to two. Yikes.

Perfectly Cooked Tenderloin Steak

So, back we went to the dining car and prepared to eat our gourmet meals. Now three of us went to boarding school where we were perpetually hungry and I don't think we're completely cured of that yet, so back-to-back meals are completely doable. Two of us ordered the steak (their specialty), one ordered the pork medallions and another ordered the salmon? We ate it all, drank a glass of wine, then rolled out of the train to drink some more wine.

The Wine Train stops at the Grgich Hills winery and it's of significance as the founder Mike Grgich, a Croatian immigrant whose Chateau Montelena Chardonnay beat French wines for the first time in the Paris Wine Tasting of 1976, instantly catapulting Napa and Californian wines into the serious global wine map. He then set up his own winery.

It was a cool, crisp, sunny day perfect for wine tasting. So in we went, got a detailed tour, sampled seven different types of wines from chardonnays to sauvignon blancs to merlots and more. Towards the end of tasting, while we were on our sixth glass of wine, as I turned to our friends and remarked that this was probably the most wine the hubby would've drunk in his life (he's a whiskey drinker) I felt a sloshing in my glass. He had poured his red into mine. He just couldn't take any more wine. Karmic connection or what! After the tasting we were each given a complimentary Grgich Hills wine glass - which we brought all the way back to India - and those wanting to sign up to be a part of their wine club could do so. 

Mustard Rubbed Pork Tenderloin

After the tour, we got back onto the wine train and sat in the lounge car for our coffee and dessert on the way back. Each trip, up and down is about an hour's ride. The views in itself were nothing spectacular. We went parallel to the road for much of the journey and years of drought in California have stripped the lushness of the foliage.

I must admit we weren't sure what we would experience on the train because a few months before, there was a ladies book club comprising predominantly African American women who were escorted out of the train for allegedly being too loud and it became a racism row. The women in October filed a $11 million racial discrimination lawsuit against the company, according to the Los Angeles Times. 

Our Grgich Hills Guide and the Oak Barrels

However, our trip was very enjoyable and the lounge car on our way back was full of slightly buzzed people chatting among themselves and we had a short but entertaining conversation with the people on the table next to ours. The train staff are still a bit touchy about any reference to the book club incident and when someone joked about getting kicked off if he spoke to loudly, he was told to please refrain from bringing it up!

Wine Library Grgich Hills Winery

The wine train is a bit of an extravagance, but its totally worth the experience for those who enjoy fine dining and the good life. Have crossed that off my bucket list.