The Le Arabia restaurant at Kazhakuttom is a place I have been visiting or ordering home delivery from once in a while ever since they opened and this is a place that pretty much rocked the food scene here in Kazhakuttom by introducing dishes from the Arab cuisine that was previously unheard of in the area… I mean, until they opened, the only option was the Shwarma… Now, thanks to them, we are enthusiasts of a lot more 🙂 Among the Non-Arab items in their menu, what I enjoy the most is their biriyani… They sell two kinds of biriyanis namely the Malabari one, which I am most familiar with since I am natively from that part of India and then they also do Hyderabadi style biriyani as well… For those who are not aware, even though both are made thru whats known as the Dum cooking, the difference lies both in the type of rice used as well as in the variety of spices that are used in the cooking process and so the taste is completely different…
In this particular instance, I went for their Fish Biriyani… When ordering the waiter informed me that they ran out of the Malabari version and so asked if it was okay if they served me the Hyderabadi version… This was fine by me… Having known me for quite some time, the waiter informed me that they have their Tawa Fried Prawns available and so, I went for a portion of that as well… 🙂
As always, everything got served together… The biriyani got served as usual in what I call a deceptively large looking bowl… Why I say so is because, its one of those double-walled bowls where the inside is not even half as big as what it looks from the outside… 🙂 The biriyani got served topped with a Papadum, along with a small bowl of Vegetable Raita and about a tablespoon of Lime pickle in a small cup as shown in the pics…
The biriyani has two fairly sizable pieces of fish in it… From the taste, it felt like they were using the Indian Cobia… The rice was somewhat fragrant with ghee and saffron… The masala used gives a balance of sweet and spicy along with some sourness which usually can be seen with fish recipes in South India (we do add some acidic component whenever we cook fish), which in this case appeared to have come from Coccum/Kokkum… Among other flavours what I could detect to be leading were of Cinnamon, Clove, Cardamom and Mace (especially that one)… I found the fish to have been cooked perfectly and the layers to just fall off easy at the touch of my fork… Only downside for me was that I wish the raita was not that sour… Other than that, I consider this to be one of the good biriyanis in Trivandrum… 🙂
Along with the Biriyani, I got served the Tawa Fried Prawns… The portion consisted of 10 medium sized prawns fried on a Tawa, served with some green salad on the side…
From the taste, I could tell that the spice rub on the prawns was essentially the good old classic combination of spices consisting of pepper, chilly powder, turmeric, coriander powder, ginger-garlic (I guess as paste), and they seem to have added lemon juice in it as well for the sour component… All pretty much char-grilled on the Tawa… This on its own is a great snack to have and I found it to work incredibly well with the biriyani along with the vegetables in the green salad which gives a bit of a crunch to the whole texture as you eat… 🙂
Altogether a good lunch thats a must try if you haven’t yet… 🙂
