Tabula Beach impresses with its grainy smooth sand and tempting seaside menu. By Devi Singh
Its al fresco looks like a party scene from one of those renowned shores we are aware of, sure to make you forget you are in a clamorous city after all with the necessary charms and characters of a beach side shack - the palms and bird cage lights perfectly thrown in. The place even has sand under your feet for the times you wished to unwind but couldn’t really plan a getaway and yearned for walking bare foot on those therapeutic grains. Beach and the cityIJ Probably. The insides though are a stark contrast from the outside seemingly beachy wonders. The long neon illuminated bar is anything but the usual sights you are accustomed to at the capital’s bar scene. Giving a feel of one of those plush spaces for a leisurely drink - this one sure knows how to take that stress overload off your head for some time.
After soaking in the environs and moving on from our vacation mode to our gustatory needs we set our sight on the menu which has the flavours from South Africa to Kerala to the South East Asia. A nice mix of Orient and Occident with a bit of Creole thrown in. Expect a heady mix of spices, already. Sticking to the theme the menu is pretty inventive and has all the nautical elements including the delightful graphics of divers. We embarked on our sea voyage with vegetable pots which came in dainty little pouches of flour stuffed with mildly flavoured veggies. Next up were mushroom and spinach croutons which overwhelmed our palate with the waft of spinach or maybe mushrooms or maybe both.
This we gulped down with a sweet and milky concoction of chiku and éclair with vodka serving as the tipple base. From some fungi we decided to go for hunks of chicken where we had Vietnamese skewers in lemon grass with chilli and cucumber dip. This one apparently had no taste of lemongrass coming though for some weird reason and the dip which should have been a tad spicy lacked the requisite heat. Moving on we found a superb sight in polenta which came nicely paired with aglio olio with succulent zucchini. Our second drink for the evening was a perfect accompaniment to the seaboard, the agent orange — refreshing indeed.
For the mains we decided on Portuguese bean curry which was a little on the sweeter side. From Portuguese shores we traversed to the backwaters of Kerala with typical spicy coastal curry, well-balanced with the spices rounding up the palate nicely. Summing up, if you seek to have a vacation without having one in particular then Tabula Beach is one of those few places in the city to hit.