Restaurant review: Cost-friendly pub suitable for city youngsters

The brick-finish walls and dim lights add a vintage charm to the place, while it gets its easy-going vibe from the colourful movie posters and creative décor using recycled bottles, jars and miscellany.

Their latest offer is a Sunday brunch — it already existed but was priced so high that the customers began to fade away one by one. So after slashing the rates, they’re back in action. It’s a roughly simple buffet, mostly consisting freshly prepared food. It might look limited upon first glance, but it’s better to eat just the right amount than have half a century dishes and waste food, is a concept the pub firmly believes in. Plus 10 points right there.

The buffet comes in two basic variants, with and without alcohol, apart from which the components are pretty much the same. A couple of ready-made salads, some fresh ingredients with which you can make your own bowl of greens, starters and a handful of set main course options to choose from.

Frozen foods placed near the entrance, which entail seafood, select meats and veggies, can be cooked to each guests’ choice and there are live dosa and pasta counters too but we skipped those because they seemed, well, usual.

For hardcore meat eaters like us, the salads actually came as the best surprise. Fresh, crunchy and with the right amount of dressing, they were the perfect beginning and palate cleanser between each bite of the appetiser platters we were given. Point to note — don’t dilly-dally but eat the starters as soon as you get them, for they become rock hard and tasteless over fifteen minutes; they taste great when hot.

Sample portions of lamb shepherd’s pie, grilled spiced fish with buttered rice and coconut gravy, and pan-seared honey chicken with garlic potatoes and buttered veggies were the main courses we opted to review. Each one stood out on its own and paired well with draught beer, which was our preferred drink for the brunch.

As for the desserts, the choices are limited and we wish the pub would rotate the options instead of placing the same gatuex, coconut and jaggery payasam and other assorted pastries, weekly. Despite this minor drawback, if we were to meet a bunch of friends for a pocket-friendly brunch, we would pick this pub.

Address: DeeCee Manor, 90, GN Chetty Road, T. Nagar

Cuisine: Chinese, Indian, Continental

Must-have: Tandoori jhinga, Mediterranean salad, stuffed mushroom

Timing: 11 am to 12 am