Food Review: Confusing grandiosity of Flames Restaurant

The places we’ve visited till now and have published about have been moderate on our wallets. This place was huge. In both sense of the word, its size and the bite it takes on your budget.

Flames is a family restaurant and a popular one among business executives. No-one would want to have a date here – not unless the couple’s too bent upon to do something crazy!

The restaurant is particularly neat, dimly lit and is handled by extremely well mannered waiters. The off-side, obviously, is that the food is preposterously expensive. So everything that I’ve written today is keeping in mind the absurdly high price of the dish in concern.

The Menu is exhaustive. They serve Italian, Continental, Mexican, Chinese and Indian cuisine. With every order you also get a complimentary drink and Fryums.

Complimentary Drink

This traditional nimbu pani drink is to refresh you and cheer up your appetite. The drink was salted, probably to make it more delectable and less citric.

Complimentary Fryums

To be honest, I’ve never had fryums in restaurants before. This was my first time, and it had me reminiscing and sent me back to childhood again. The taste you might ask? It’s the same everywhere! No one can mess these up.

After bathing in the glory of the sophistication being shown by the servers we decided it was time to start ordering.

French Onion Soup

I haven’t found this in many restaurants in Udaipur. Hence, I was naturally intrigued. French onion has many variants, my favourite is with caramelized onions and cheese toasts. Both have to be prepared skillfully, and individually.

This French toast was energizing. A strong reminder of what I’d been missing for a while. The gravy was very thin though, but an easily ignorable fact.

Baby Corn Crunchy

Baby corn crunchy is crispy baby corn tossed in sour and spicy sat.

I’ve started to like this dish nowadays. But again I found garlic in excess. It upsets the balance of entire dish. Apart from the garlic-ness of the gravy, the dish was lovely also owing to the fact that it was served with tartar sauce!

I think tartar sauce made it better. There wasn’t a fault I could pick here. But I still wouldn’t recommend this.

After trying out the starter and the soup we decided to go with Italian cuisine. Surprisingly, they didn’t have pizzas we could order.

Supreme Spaghetti

People often confuse Spaghetti and Noodles and they are right in some extent. But the difference lies in their origin; spaghetti is made from pasta turned to cylindrical shape.

Our spaghetti was prepared with tomatoes in large. It was not very sweet, often tasteless instead (as my friend stresses). It wasn’t very grand or extraordinary. We expected better that this. There was nothing except spaghetti, no gravy, no topping, just spaghetti.

Not recommendable at all.

Cheesy Lasagnia

Lasagnia is again made from pasta. In fact, it is pasta layers stuffed with serving in between. This lasagne was dipped in gravy, a break from the usual style. And my favorite part, it was helped with a generous amount of cheese!

The lasagne was delicious. The first thing about Flames that moved me.

I loved every bite that I took, my friend didn’t like it but it’s his personal problem (Italian food is not his liking). I would gladly recommend this to anyone, but would also warn that it stands expensive at Re 175.

Blue Lagoon

Aah! I have a corner of my heart booked for mocktails. I adore them. A restaurant without mocktails isn’t a good restaurant at all! Blue Lagoon is a mocktail that I hunt desperately, because it’s one of my favourites. The Blue Lagoon at Flames was excellent! My friend had some complaints about the drink being sweet, but I savoured it. The fizz rocked the drink. I would also recommend this.

Fruit Salad

This was a mistake. The kind of mistake you make when you board a wrong train and want to get down immediately, but you can’t, because the train is moving at full throttle and there’s no looking back.

We thought they’d present the dessert with mouth-savouring cream or curd or custard with at least 6 types of fruit. We had no idea how wrong we were.

Well, I don’t have to say anything except that I could have fed fruits to 5 hungry people and have had them satisfied with Re 125 but I wasted the money on an imbecile choice of dessert instead. It’s been a week, I still feel sorry.

We were feeling guilty when our bill arrived. We didn’t expect so much. And the Fruit Salad was still enraging us, but there was nothing we could do. I have made a promise to myself of checking every dish with the waiter before ordering, in case I make the same mistake again. I have no complains about the pricing of the soup, spaghetti and Blue lagoon at Re 90, Re 160 and Re 90 respectively.

But I do feel robbed by Lasagne and Fruit Salad at Re 175 and Re 125. Our total bill was Re 989 [Re 900 for food + Re 89 for taxes].

I find no point of visiting such restaurant again. I could have had a meal for one in a five-star restaurant with this budget. But again, quality never compromises.

Perhaps that was the case here, because you might notice that I never complained about corn, cheese or toast here. The material they use is the best.

As always, please feel free to criticize me for being so deceptive with the choice of words or to criticize the restaurant for being a deception of grandiose.

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