Kebabs served assembly line

Get ready for some mouth watering kebabs served up buffet style with great alacrity but at your table

The moment you enter The Great Kebab Factory, a first for Bangalore at a crowded mall in Malleshwaram, you will be surprised with the sheer amount of activity going on in this eatery. Staff dressed up in smart blue uniforms can be seen running about serving people, barking orders at the open plan kitchen where the chefs are busy grilling, frying, basting and cooking. This buzz almost does resemble a factory like set up where the journey of the food from the kitchen to your plate is pretty much assembly line.u00a0 The d ufffdcor has a lot of copper hints with pots and pans hanging from the walls along with glass painted lamps in shades of yellows, reds and blues and wrought iron furniture.


Galouti Kebabs served with Ulta Tawa Parathau00a0Pics/ Satish
Badiger

The moment you sit down, you will be handed a card that comprises a vegetarian and a non-vegetarian set menu (Rs 599 plus taxes). The concept is like a buffet but served at your table.u00a0 When we chose the non-vegetarian version, a staffer explained to us in detail what the menu would comprise. You are served six kinds of kebabs that include lamb, fish and chicken along with different kinds of breads followed by a rice dish as main course with a curry, two kinds of daal and finally four kinds of desserts along with as many repeats as you want.

We started off with some garden salad in the form of lettuce, cucumber and sliced watermelon served with a sweet pineapple relish as dressing. This was followed up by the Galouti Kebab served with a mini Ulta Tawa Paratha.u00a0 We were explained what the Galouti was made of and how we ought to eat it for best results in this case stuffed into the paratha with lots of onion and some mint chutney. The kebab was moist, crumbly and made out of lamb mince.

Softened by papaya, these kebabs were just ready to disintegrate into meaty bites of heaven in our mouth and were perfect with the paratha. Up next was the Patiala Macchi and the Lahoori Chooza. The restaurant changes up its menu every single day so you may not find the exact repeats. While the fish was coated in a spicy besan batter and deep fried, the chooza or chicken was marinated in yoghurt and spices and grilled in the tandoor.u00a0 Tomato, tamarind, peanut and mint chutneys served with the kebabs helped perk them up.

Though the Mahi Taj Kebab, another fish kebab turned out to be rubbery and lacked in seasoning, the Zaffrani Murgh Tikka was grilled just right with the outside charred and crisp and the meat inside tender and juicy. The Shammi Kebab turned out to be a formidable contender to the Galouti holding on its own with its soft lamb and chana daal mince toasted on the tawa till it was crisp and ready to be consumed. But we found ourselves wanting to repeat another one of those Galouti and ulta tawa paratha combinations.

The nice part about the meal is the different kinds of breads served with the kebabs. The Sheer Mal, a sweet Lucknowi paratha spiked with saffron went particularly well with the yellow moong dal cooked with garlic, while we moped up the Daal Factory a slightly tangy version of the usual Dal Makhni with bits of garlic naan.

The Dum Murgh Biryani was fragrant and light on the grease factor and went well with the raita, but we didn't have enough stomach space to check out the Achari Paneer or the Mutton Rogan Josh, the day's special mains. Dessert was a pleasant surprise in the form of hot Gulab Jamoon, Moong Dal Halwa and the chilled Ras Malai, the surprise in the package was the hand churned Paan Ice cream. This pista green tinged icecream had a liberal use of rosewater to tone down the pungency of the betel leaves but came with bits of the leaves, cherries and other assortment of mysterious ingredients that goes into a paan tucked away into the icecream. It was sweet, soothing and reminded us of a kulfi.

More than the mains here, fill up on the interesting kebabs we say. But we wish the staff would take some time to linger on at each table and explain the intricacies of kebab ingredients to us slightly slower instead of churning out memorised spiel before hurtling along to the next table.
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THE GREAT KEBAB fACTORY
Food: Good
Service: Hyper
Ambience: Average

At: The Great Kebab Factory, Mantri Square Mall, Malleshwaram
Call:u00a0 22667360
Meal for two:u00a0 Rs 1, 250
The Great Kebab Factory offers weekday lunches with four kinds of kebabs at Rs 450 plus taxes and dinner at R 599 plus taxes. Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays both lunch and dinner is priced at R 599 plus taxes.