It starts on Mabelle’s birthday

We started for Delhi on the day my younger niece turned 2. Time flies, I still remember driving down to Hyd from Pune (550kms in 9 hours J) to see her the first time. And now she is two year old with a mind of her own. Oh yeah, she already knows the first 4 days of the week, apart from all the title songs of the soaps on TV. Kids these days!

Anyways since this was a planned trip, we got our tickets well in time and got it cheap so no problems there either. What ticked me off was the packing, and what got my blood fuming was a bag full of sweaters/jackets/warm clothes. Oh the price to pay for mutton seekh kabab from Jawahar!

The travel to the airport and other procedure was nothing to talk about. Since I am writing about food, lets start with what I had at the airport.

We had about two hours to kill and didn’t want to eat the cold food that is served on the flight, so we decide to have some food at the airport. This is the terminal on the first floor, with the gates A1-A8. It’s got a food court with most of the usual suspects that you find at other airports. Idli.com, Dominos, KFC, Cafechino. Curry kitchen. Brightly lit area for seating, clean tables and chairs complete the setting.

We started with the dahi bhalla from Curry Kitchen, it’s absolutely nothing to talk about. I believe that no street food should be consumed when it’s not done on the street. This one just proved my point. It was a sterile version of the ones we have at our paani-puri waala uncle. I wonder if you can really blame them, I find any chaat served in stores to not be any good. It’s as if the pollution from the road adds another dimension to the flavour which can never be matched by these stores. And you can’t under-estimate the taste added by the person mixing every thing with his bare hands: Hands which are used for other purposes when it’s not putting together a tasty sev-puri. So can’t really blame them for this.

But 70Rs for two bhallas and whatever else was on the plate was a bit too much. Air travel ain’t cheap

At the same time I tried some chicken pop-corns from KFC. It’s been a long time since I had anything from KFC and just wanted to try this since I haven’t had this earlier. These are like little sad pieces of bone-less chicken coated with the usual kfc secret mix. The chicken pieces were small, they were chewy and too salty.

Another sad story, didn’t like it at all.

This was followed by pavbhaji from curry kitchen. Again a disappointment and again too expensive at 120Rs.  Let me not go into much more detail there.

So, all in all a good start to the trip. If you are wondering how it’s a good start, here is my argument - Airport food is never good so it was up to expectation.

Let’s hope the rest of the trip is the same J.