Cafe Shalimar, Ghatkopar West

Hello dear foodies! It’s been a while our last review. We could give so many excuses for being MIA, like lack of time to visit any restaurant etc. but we won’t do that. Anyway, today was planned for a review visit to a certain place, but due to some issues, we decided to go to some other place to have lunch. We were so famished and it was 5pm so we went to the first place that we saw and it happened to be this place called Café Shalimar.

It is a small restaurant which has a limited seating area. We considered it to be a safe option because 1. It was a restaurant owned by a Muslim, which roughly means awesome non vegetarian food and 2. It was cheap! You can never beat this combination now, can you? And this isn’t linked to the famous chain of Shalimar restaurants. We do wonder why they named this place as ‘Café’ when they serve meals!

Anyway, so this is a type of restaurant where you sit eat and go. The service is super quick; we got our dishes in maximum 5-10 minutes after ordering them. There’s no such thing as ambience here. There are tables and seats that get cleaned the moment you finish eating.

We decided on our order in flat couple of minutes, because we were starving! We ordered the following things-

For Starters, we ordered:

1.       Chicken 65 Dry: This was a really nice starter, and it had big chunks of chicken. It had a slightly achari taste to it which we enjoyed. It also had huge chunks of capsicum and onion. It wasn’t that dry because it came with a wee bit of gravy. It was awesome and we finished this one up super quickly.

Chicken 65 Dry

2.       Chicken Lollipop: Can one ever go wrong with a dish as common as this? No! Hence we ordered it! It was very crispy and yummy. The batter did not feel oily at all. It was a little dry but we enjoyed it. It came with a sauce of its own. The sauce was okay, it wasn’t as good as other schezwan sauce we’ve had before. But the lollipop was so good in itself that we did not need the sauce.

Chicken Lollipop

For Main Course, we ordered:

1.       Chicken Hakka Noodles: It was really nice and it had shredded chicken and eggs in it. We do admit that plain hakka noodles are a little bland to eat, so if you someone who loves spices in each and every dish, then you might skip this. The noodles were very well cooked and we love to have such dishes once in a while.

Chicken Hakka Noodles

2.       Chicken Tikka Biryani: We thought that the noodles were fantastic until we tasted this one! This is one of the best biryani’s we’ve had at this price! It tasted somewhat like our favorite Khepsa! The chicken gravy was below the rice so you had to mix it and eat it. The concept is also somewhat like khepsa where the place the chicken gravy at the bottom and then cover it up with plain rice. Loved this! It came with a nice liquidy salad with finely diced vegetables.

Chicken Tikka Biryani

For Desserts, we picked up the classic Caramel Custard. Since one of us has a major sweet tooth, one custard wasn’t sufficient enough, so we ordered another one. It had just the perfect amount of sweetness to it. Perfect end to a perfect meal!

Caramel Custard

What we liked the most was the super quick service. By the time we were starting on the first dish, the second dish was placed in front of us! The quantity served is great for the price. Not one dish was a mere okay. For the price we paid here, nothing can beat this!

Ambience: 1 / 5

Food: 4 / 5

Service: 5 / 5

VFM: 5 / 5

We recommend the Chicken Tikka Biryani and Chicken 65 starter!

Bon Appetit!