The ambience of good food

Parampara takes you through Oriental, North and South Indian fare with great care for authenticity in taste, decor and service.

Parampara Restaurant in Panampally Nagar has a lot in store for food lovers who enjoy sampling signature dishes. Try out their Vietnamese summer roll, the appetiser, followed by Nasi Goreng - Indonesian sea food fried rice- with beef Penang for an assorted taste of authentic oriental dishes. They are served spicy or non-spicy as per your taste.

Interesting mix

The theme, décor and style of cooking are ‘paramparic', traditional. The interior is spacious and the design rustic and traditional sans frills. The ‘Cudappah' flooring, Plaster of Paris walls with artificial patches here and there, bamboo-like wooden partitions and waiters in Rajasthani ‘prince' coats aim at recreating the ambience of an ethnic tavern. Soft ghazals by Pankaj Udhas in the dimly lit hall creates a mood. The roughly finished tables and elegant chairs, cutlery with brass handles, unusually big mouthed tumblers offer interesting reproductions of ethnic North Indian eateries. Nissam Easukunju, asst. restaurant manager says, “it is our intention to serve everything in accordance with tradition. Though the accent is more on North India, with cooks from Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab and Chhattisgarh , we also serve traditional toddy shop cuisine varieties like ‘meen peera' and ‘vattichathu', squid varuval, chicken stew with noolappam, kappa (tapioca), puttu etc.”

We order a tandoor vegetable starter an assortment of seekh kebab, paneer, pineapple and vegetable skewer and tandoori aloo. The portion was generous for two and the taste different. Starters range from Rs.70 onwards.

Three thalis - all North Indian with parathas- vegetarian (Rs.120) non-veg (Rs.140) and Bengali fish curry thali (Rs.160) are served for lunch.

We tried the Vietnamese summer roll - fresh avocado, cucumber wrapped in steamed cabbage leaf. Our taste buds took time to adjust to this unusual snack.

But then we were there to experiment and explore!

Ajo Vargheese, the chef, said, “our signature dishes are rotis like kurmina-naan coated with cheese and tomato paste, missi roti - bread made with besan flour, kulcha stuffed with spring onions, marthabaq - kheema stuffed parathas.”

In the main course, the choices were many. We opted for the Char Keo Teo- a noodle dish popular in Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore consisting of flat rice noodles with sea food, chicken and vegetables and another plate of mix noodles.

While a plate of noodles and fried rice range from Rs.90 to Rs.150, most of the accompaniments - the side dishes do not go beyond Rs. 240. This is quite reasonable for such an elaborate and gracious spread. Meanwhile on scanning the menu some interesting choices catch our attention- Chilli Honey Wings- hot and sweet broiled chicken wings, mutton mulaguthanni soup, beef and mushroom parcel, Thai glass noodles with peanut salad and chengdu chicken.

Food story

Nissam and Ajo went to great lengths to explain and unravel the story behind these creations.

Since no meal would be complete without these ‘after sweets' we scanned the desserts and sweets section to fill that wee bit of space left after the sumptuous meal.

From a list comprising of frozen chocolate and nut pancake, fried ice cream, choco gulab jamun we choose Darsaan as per the chef's recommendation - a dessert of sweetened crispy fried noodles glazed with honey and served with a nice scoop of good old vanilla ice cream. This indeed turned out to be a sweet and lip-smacking finish to a fulfilling meal.