Food review: Punjab Grill by Jiggs Kalra in Bangalore

Punjab Grill, SJR Primus, Ground Floor, Opposite Forum Mall, Koramangala, 7th Block (cards accepted)
Parking available
Rating: ***

If you’ve ever been fed by Jiggs Kalra at any of the food promotions in Bangalore that he would often conduct, you’d know that he loves to pamper his diners especially if they’re the sort who love to eat. Punjab Grill by Jiggs Kalra (yes, that’s the name of the whole restaurant!) bears traces of the opulence the man seems to firmly believe in. You walk into a vast expanse of a restaurant that’s anything but cosy, split into a lounge and dining area. The smiling hostess, the attendants who are eager to please are all evidences of a new restaurant that’s fighting to occupy that special place in the hearts of Bangaloreans.

For me it was a surprising Monday night dinner because I walked in to a nearly packed restaurant. It’s a good thing we had reservations and as I stared at the people around, I was quite delighted to realise that people would eat out any day of the week - be it a Monday or a Thursday.

From then on, the next two and a half hours that I spent at Punjab Grill ranged from marvellous to disappointing. Beginning with the Cheese Kurkuri, a vertical desi version of a wanton that is filled with mushrooms, cheese, pine nuts and fried, served with a sweet chilli sauce — the simplicity of the whole creation was the perfect accompaniment with Gulabo and Anari — two house-special cocktails using Indian ingredients such as spices and coriander and chilli, along with rose syrup and pomegranate juice respectively. A good start, I’d say. The crunchiness of the kurkuri met the sweetness of the chilli sauce with gusto.

The Salmon Tikka followed next. This chunk of Norwegian steak of salmon looks simple and tastes exotic. But as I found out, it undergoes at least two levels of marination before the final product is served. Marinated with dill leaves, ginger garlic paste, honey and red wine vinegar, the fish is then treated with yoghurt, turmeric, ginger garlic yet again and a hint of mustard oil and fennel before it’s dashed into the tandoor. But that’s not all. After being in a tandoor for a while, it’s taken out, wrapped in foil and sent back in again. The juices intact, the texture perfect and the colour — pink on the inside — and not as chewy as it can get, this was perhaps the best thing I dug my fork into that night. Next came the Dahi Ke Kebab — a dish that’s already quite popular in Indian fine dining restaurants. A relative flat patty of curd that is hung nearly overnight — and then treated with spices etc and fried after being coated with rice flour — it is served with mint chutney. Did I like it? I am not quite sure. Given that this particular kebab is always a little bland and even with the texture being rather clean, I couldn’t quite relate to the flavour. However, it was the Tandoori Guchchi that blew my mind. The guchchi is quite an interesting mushroom. More like a morel, it looks like a small bitter gourd once cooked. Incidentally it grows at about 9,000 feet in Himchal Pradesh and is the state’s most expensive crop. At Punjab Grill, this guchchi has made its way into many dishes. My starter was stuffed with cheese, mawa (milk cake) and dry fruits and coated with a yogurt-based and then cooked in a clay oven. The slippery texture of the morel lends a very interesting flavour to the dish with the cheese adding a sense of familiarity and the dry fruits doing their job of turning it into something exotic.

Ready for the entrées I have to add that nothing that I tasted was overwhelming enough for me, barring the Sarson Da Saag. This perennially favourite dish from Punjab combines mustard leaves, spinach and bathua, which is then cooked in rice powder for the bonding and tempered with garlic, coriander seeds, red chillies and juliennes of ginger. Even though I found it be on the saltier side, which was in fact the case of most of the main dishes, the Sarson Da Saag took me back to the north Indian highways; not to forget the makki di roti served with homemade white butter and some jaggery. The Meat Punjab Grill, where baby lamb pieces are cooked in a brown onion gravy and rubbed with rogan (the Persian name for ‘oil’ the plant Dyers’ Bugloss) that produces a red tint and is known to be used in the rogan josh; in fact, it’s also been reported that the name ‘rogan josh’ comes from the oil from this plant called ‘rattan jot’. Irrelevant of that, this specific dish has the best meat I’d eaten in a while in a gravy that didn’t do anything to my palate — not even impressing it remotely.

A maa ki daal is must when on a dinner like this. At Punjab Grill, it’s called Daal Punjab Grill. Was it as good as it should be?

Close enough but not quite. It lacked the rusticity of the whole daal, even though the flavours were pretty much alright.
Here’s the thing about Punjab Grill. To me, it comes across as a restaurant that serves Undivided India’s Punjabi food with a modern twist. And with that, it brings high-end fine dining to the masses. There’s nothing wrong with the effort but the flavours aren’t unique even though the ingredients are and the pricing of the dishes is on the higher side too. While the food is apparently not as spicy or rich as expected; be prepared to put on  some weight after a hearty meal; if you’re going, go in a big bunch, the portions are large.

If you must have dessert — try the Litchie Ki Tehri. It did iron out my frowns a bit.