Food at the ITC Kakatiya at the Hyderabad Times Party

You can check out my other
blog for a review of the party but this is the place to review the
food, the only bright spot of the party.

The bar was well equipped with Chivas, Bacardi, Smirnoff & Old Monk, but
no cocktails were being served at all, which immediately brought the
Hyderabad Times (HT) party down in my esteem. Whats a good party if you
cant have good bartenders mixing up some fancy cocktails.

But the food more than made up for all the other lackings of the party.
Kakataiya's food in Hyderabad has to rank among the best.

There were buffet tables for salad, Haleem(veg option on offer too),
Hyderabadi cuisine, Oriental cuisine, Lebanese cuisine, Frontier &
Awadhi cuisine, an Indian Grill section apart from the desserts.

The Salad table had only vegetarian salads, so that was totally missable
unless you were one of those on a Navaratri Fast.

The Haleem table had veg and mutton options. And you could add the
garnishings of crispy fried onions, chopped dhaniya & pudina leaves and
lemon to your hearts content. The haleem was tasty but it was more of a
mincey consistency than a fluffly paste. So it ended up being more of a
mince gravy than a haleem feel to it.

Ok, before I go further, let me apologise to the vegetarians that I
cannot review the veg stuff at all. Given the variety of non-veg food on
offer, I did not even venture to waste time on eating the non-meat
items.

The Hyderabadi cuisine had 2 types of non veg biryanis chicken and
mutton. The mutton was better. The chicken korma and the salans were
good accompaniments.

The oriental table had some amazing lamb meat balls in garlic sauce. The
phad thai was below par but the ginger rice and the thai red chicken
curry were outstanding.

The lebaneese table had the most amazing chicken shawrmas with all the
accompaniments that you can think of. The rice stuffed veggies were good
and the biryani here was much better than either the hyderabadi ones. It
was a mix of chicken, lamb and egg. Delicious !!!!

The Frontier cuisine had some good kebabs. The dal bukhara was not upto
Delhi's standards but good for Hyderabad standards.

The chicken khurchan in the grill section was good but the fish chops
were out of this world.

Desserts were an amalagam of stuff. Most commendable were the jelebis
and gulab jamuns.

So the best stuff would have to be the fish chops, the shawrma, the lebanese biryani and the thai red chicken curry with ginger rice.