Charcoal – taste it

Well that’s my first post on this category – Review One, I will start with some thing which I love the most – FOOD. 

I was recently in Charcoal Restaurant situated at Purna Das road (South Kolkata), This nice trendy restaurant is easy to reach, and even better you find parking everywhere. The ambiance of the place is very trendy and good. It offers 2-3 different seating options.

One with low table height and sofa combination, while the other is standard dinning table kind option and of course the one with combination of Sofa & wooden seat.

The restro could easily seat 30-40 people or 5-6 large groups, The seat we took offered us good view of kitchen trough glass partition. One could see the chef preparing delicacies.. Although I should admit that the watching the chef didn’t excite me.. That’s because he just played with bit of fire while preparing Sizzlers for few other customer. I would have liked if the chef had shown us few more of his skills..

I saw the continental menu and almost decided my menu, but my friend did not want to experiment and suggested that we should eat something Indian. Finally we setteled for continental starter and Indian main course.

For starters we ordered Tacos “that’s normal tortillas with extra corn / cheese”  Tacos weren’t exciting and my friend decided that since I ordered the starter  the onus was on me to clear the plate (and I obliged, not by choice)

For main course, I recommended Tawa Mirch (Stuffed Capsicum) and my friend choose-ed another paneer dish.. We ordered Butter Roti. The very thought of Stuffed Capsicum excited me, I dreamt of days when I used to be home and mother would prepare Stuffed capsicum, we used to enjoy it with Plane dal and Tawa Roti. 

I could see the bearer through partition, he was bringing our Tawa Mirch.. Movement he served it, I was disappointed.. It was much gravier than I thought and the stuffing was not very great. 

We settled for what came, and ate it.. 

Here are my charcoal ratings: (out of 5)

Location: 4

Ambiance: 3

Service: 2.5

Food: 2 (It wasn’t bad, but didn’t meet my expectation)

Overall: 3

So if you plan to go to Charcoal, don’t go really for exotic food.. just go there to enjoy the time Peacefully!

Durgapur Expressway; Good Road, Bad infrastructure

Just a week before, I had an opportunity to go to Durgapur – a small industrial town about 150 km from Kolkata. We were travelling in our car and it took us little over 2.5hrs to reach Durgapur from Kolkata, by far a quick journey by Indian standards.

This short journey was only possible because the road, 4-lane expressway, way above any Indian highways. The same journey 7-8 years back would have taken 5-6 hrs easily. Thanks to previous NDA government, India took initiative to connect all its metro by expressway; the project was called GOLDEN QUANDRANTANGLE. Very fortunately, the successive UPA government didn’t shelf the project; a very common case in democratic India where opposition first closes all projects started by previous govt.

Well coming back to the discussion, although the Durgapur Expressway (DE) is quite good, it doesn’t have features, a modern infrastructure should have. Many parts of road are barely lighted; there are no reflectors what so ever. Moreover, the most dangerous one, there are no meridian; what we have is two beautiful strips of road separated by uncultured grass and big hollow channel. On both side of road there are no reflectors, the road is at least 6-10 ft higher that the surrounding, exposing drivers to risk of slipping away from mail road. The danger is so high that buses and trucks can overturn if they are little careless. My fears were answered while returning, when I saw a truck has plunged itself into deep channel on the side of the road, obviously the truck was overturned because of the slide. 

The authorities of the toll way have barricaded both sides of roads, making sure that existing petrol pumps are out of business. So essentially if you driving on DE, make sure you have full tank of fuel.

All the above reason makes me to comment that DE is a great road but for it to be a good world class infrastructure it has to travel long distance. 

Drive safely!

kk