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Zamu's Place : Tarde Venientibus Ossa

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All good things begin with the knowing of names. And Zamu’s Place, for a place, we knew that had Irani/Parsi antecedents, had us pretty confident that it was named after Zamu and that he was some guy, probably the owner, who was loved sufficiently enough by his family and friends to have his name abbreviated into the Zamu we know today. Maybe someone even, who, after a long day of managing the culinary extravaganza that is Zamu’s Place from the counter, would go back to his friends for a game of Carrom while sipping on his orange juice, waiting for Sanjay Dutt to mouth some stupid inanity as Munnabhai. Thus, we were quite surprised, and pleasantly so, that ZaMu was actually a coming together of two names, Zal and Murad, the two sons of the man, Daraius Cursetjee who began this restaurant. The other word in the name is Place. This relatively innocuous word also has deep significance for this restaurant as it is, we learned, an oft forgotten and ignored part of the restaurant name wher

The Bombay Brasserie- The #Hashtag Review

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#Iwasinvited This was then round 2 of our collaboration with Radio One wherein we go to restaurants with their DJs, their support staff and happily enough, their professional level photographer. The presence of a professional level photographer with professional level equipment and professional level attitude meant that we were not needed to, play in ridiculous ways, with the zoom option of our phone cameras, in our sometimes exasperating efforts to get a serviceable photo. This meant that we could focus on more imaginative ways to stuff our faces while thinking of rather smart metaphors and hashtags to describe the food. #noteveryonewantstobeGujjarafterall The restaurant, Bombay Brassiere, we were supposed to visit was seeing its second coming in Pune and it was in the very plush, but almost jinxed, Nitesh Hub which, as per rumors, is a place where some mall dreams go to die. The earlier rendition of Bombay B (henceforth shortened to Bombay B because I’m super

Deccan Harvest - Magarpatta with Radio One

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This review comes about as an invitation for a tasting by Radio One as part of their initiative to launch a coffee table book with reviews to some of the best restaurants in Pune. As part of this initiative they invite bloggers around the town for tastings at their partner restaurants with their RJs and support staff. It was thus, DOP’s pleasure to accompany MJ Tarun and Anjali from Radio One to Deccan Harvest, the multicuisine restaurant at Magarpatta. Amongst the first things that was noticed as we entered the restaurant is the truly brilliant ambience of the place which combined an all glass, double heighted ceiling design to provide perhaps one of the most airy feeling restaurants in all of Pune. Combine this further with the fact that the restaurant is placed smack dab in the middle of the greenest part of Magarpatta (which is otherwise as urban, IT dystopian and boring as you can get) makes this a place you should go to when you want to revel in the megalomaniac pleasure of hav

TVUM-The You in Utopia

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"Recycling and speed limits are bullshit,” Tyler said. “They’re like someone who quits smoking on his deathbed.”    It’s Project Mayhem that’s going to save the world. A cultural ice age. A prematurely induced dark age. Project Mayhem will force humanity to go dormant or into remission long enough for the Earth to recover.  “You justify anarchy,” Tyler says. “You figure it out.”  Like fight club does with clerks and box boys, Project Mayhem will break up civilization so we can, make something better out of the world." Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk In the book, Fight Club, Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt in the movie rendition) says these words as he is divulging his plan to save the world from itself through a set of actions that can loosely be termed as anarchic. As soon as I read it, in the first breaths of a morning, I was taken back to that fateful Tuesday night spent in the company of Praful Chandawarkar (Owner, Malaka Spice) and Dr. Uday Potdar, where conver

And so it goes...

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a new era in dudes writing about food, or so we believe. What began as a partnership in gluttony (remember the Baked and Wired 28” Pizza challenge which the two of us, erm, annihilated) is now playing itself out to its logical conclusion, wherein we, Abbas and Pranav, go to our favorite food places and write about them. Since there has to be a name given to this partnership (because fuck, have you heard of dudes writing about food without getting their monikers in a twist?), we’ve decided to call ourselves, “Drunk On Petroleum”, after something one of our favourite authors, Kurt Vonnegut, wrote. We were going to be called something serious and refined, maybe bordering on self-congratulatory even, but decided not to pander to these false notions of grandiosity of who we are. Of course, there’s also the logic that if we’re Drunk on Petroleum, we can permit ourselves a little fun too which is of nearly primal importance to those involved in this enterpri