Agrahar Cafe: Sadhya

Recently my mother showed me an ad of a new vegetarian place nearby called Agrahar Cafe and the key highlight which she pointed out was the availability of Sadhya on a regular basis… We had been planning to go and try it but in between both me and my father ended up being sick and on this day, my mother also was not feeling well… Because of this we decided to order lunch and while checking out the delivery app for option, this place showed as a new addition… Turns out the Sadya was available… They call it as Sadhya Box and since we were feeling some craving to have a sadhya, I placed the order for two Sadhya Boxes… It arrived as can be seen in the pics below…

However, couple of items were missing from the menu list, in the box to begin with… First one being the Ghee that I couldn’t find anywhere in the box and the second was Erissery but instead we got what seemed like a version of Olan… Not sure if that is their version of Erissery or not… Anyways, the pics below show the spread that I had… You won’t see a few items in the pics here cause those are the ones I tend to avoid and hence didn’t have this time… Those items would be the Banana, Pappadam, Rasam, Pulissery and Moru… My parents had them and said that they were nice…

Coming to the taste of what I had, well long story short, the food did taste as good as it looked… I really loved the Inchicurry as it was one of the best I have ever had… The lemon and mango pickles were nice too… Thoran was sadly just like and as dry as the ones we usually get in the Sadyas from other places… I can never understand why they make it so dry and practically tasteless… I think this was the first time I saw Soyabean chunks being served as part of a Sadya but the Soyabean Koottu Curry was indeed quite interesting to have… Quite spicy and tasted kind of like a meat curry masala 🙂 The Pachadis and Kichadi were seasoned just right and the Madhura Curry was so sweet that I think it could’ve been served as a Neypayasam 🙂 I liked having it on its own…

Aviyal and the regular Koottu Curry felt nice as the flavours were well balanced without too much spices and seasoned just right… The curry that looked like Olan to me was also nice… Rice was perfectly cooked and the Parippu and Sambar were at the right spice and seasoning levels… Like I mentioned before, the Ghee was missing and so I ended up having to add my own… Lastly, the Banana Chips were just like any other but that Sharkaravaratty was too hard to chew for both me and my parents…

Now coming to the dessert part of the Sadya, we got a Boli and three payasams… Ada Payasam or rather Ada Pradhaman was very flavorful with the taste of Jaggery and Cardamom… The same goes for the Parippu / Kadala Payasam (I say like that cause the payasam seemed to have both regular Parippu and Kadala Parippu in it) but it had a much higher sweetness level… It really was too sweet for my taste… Both these payasams had a rich taste of Ghee as well… The Semiya Payasam sadly was just like the average one we get from most restaurants with Semiya being sticky and bland… But the Boli tasted nice though and felt that it made up for the faults of the Semiya Payasam…

Overall, I felt that the Sadya was indeed one of the better ones that we get from restaurants in Trivandrum… I mean it is indeed enjoyable to have especially when you have a craving for Sadya but there is room for improvement as well… Hopefully they will improve soon… I’ll definitely be buying again when I feel like having Sadya as this place is nearby my home and so I can get easily thru the popular delivery apps…