Villa Maya Visit with my Parents

Went to Villa Maya in Trivandrum with my parents… I must say eating there is an experience to enjoy… I heard that the place was voted the best restaurant in India some time back… Clearly, its worth every positive review you can find about the place… One change I noticed since my last visit which was a while ago is that the portion sizes have gone up which kind of makes the middle-class guy in me a bit more satisfied since this is indeed the most expensive restaurant in the city… One main dish is enough to fill you now… Nighttime they pretty much have minimal lighting, I guess to simulate the old days of the ranthal or mutta-vilakku (as the smaller one used to be called in my hometown)… The place looks amazing as always… The architecture of it, being the old mansion kind of reminds me of our family home in Thalassery… But, looking much better 😀

Anyways, as we sat and gave our order, we were given the welcome drink of a lime-mint punch with tortilla chips topped with salsa and a couple of drops of sour cream…

One can tell that it was made fresh and so were the other dishes…

My mom being a vegetarian, went for what they call Painters platter, which basically consists of some saffron infused panner tikka, paneer shashlik and veg sheek kebabs, served with 3 chutneys – pineapple, beetroot and mint (the 3 paint bottles) and a raita salad(almost dry kind with a very thin coating of yogurt)…

Mom told me that the pieces were as soft and juicy and ever and the chutneys took it to a whole new level above… Flavours were perfect… Just the right amount of Saffron and other spices…

My Dad went for the Chicken Kati roll, which was served with mint chutney and salad…

It was so big and so packed with meat that my dad could only eat half of it (shown in the above pic) and we ended up taking the rest home to be part of our lunch on the next day and I found out that he was not kidding at all… 😀

Me being the european cuisine enthusiast, and also in the mood for some fish, went for the famous Pesce alla Puttanesca, which they do with Kingfish here…

Their take on it is more like a version of fish and chips, where they serve the fish (two boneless pieces) grilled, topped with the putanesca sauce, served along with boiled vegetables and topped with potato chips (wafer kind as julienne)… This is currently my favourite fish dish… Absolutely perfect cooking of the fish that it really melts in your mouth… Wish they gave proper potato chips instead of the wafer julienne… Not that it has any problem in taste, its just that when eating with it, you feel like you are eating it with a crushed pappadum and I don’t like pappadums… So, having the proper chips would’ve given me some placebo to enjoy the dish better… Instead I ended up skipping the wafers… 🙂

That was the end of it as we didn’t take desserts cause we didn’t have room for them… Can’t wait to go back there again… 🙂