- Rating: 4 / 5
- Where: 11, Trade View, Oasis Complex, Kamala Mills, Lower Parel
- When: 6.30 pm to 12.45 am
- Cost: About Rs 4,500 for two, with one cocktail each
- Call: 4971-6931 / 32
Just when you thought you’d seen the last ‘new’ Kamala Mills restaurant open, here is another one making a confident debut. Zorawar Kalra’s Kode is surprisingly low on the bombast one has come to expect from his brands. But it is high on sophistication.
It’s aimed at everyone from well-heeled families celebrating a graduation to couples out on a rather expensive date and lone executives nursing post-work drinks.
Kode (that’s code with a K) claims to have the country’s largest selection of whiskey brands — they stock 130, displayed at a huge steel-and-beige-granite island bar.
The granite theme is carried on to the walls, with rough-hewn boulders jutting out of some of them and chevron-patterned Mexican tiles on others. The overall feel is that of measured opulence — a good reflection of the menu, where prices hover around the four-figure mark.
Kode calls its menu ‘cuisine-agnostic’. It reads like a list of the top hits from Kode’s older siblings, Pa Pa Ya and Masala Library. So on the one hand there are diminutive salmon and cream cheese maki rolls that remind you of the ones at Pa Pa Ya, with their spicy togarashi hit.
On the other is the forgotten petal sour, a yummy gin-based riff on a traditional whiskey sour, accompanied by an edible ‘soap’ made from Campari. Its tart burst of citrus evokes Masala Library’s gin-based Mumbai Matinee.
Our baked camembert soufflé paid rich homage to the 1970s dinner party classic with its light-as-air cheesy goodness, enhanced by a generous pour of béchamel.
The sauce also turned up in the wonderfully re-imagined spiked bloody Mary, giving it a luscious, creamy top. Among the small plates, the crunchy lamb and cilantro taco was suitably straightforward, if a tad pedestrian and lacking in oomph.
The 18-hours cooked lamb shanks, served with a blue cheese and black truffle polenta, along with a red wine jus, had us mopping the dish clean with morsels of warm potato bread.
Generously portioned, the saffron-redolent chicken and seafood paella was surf-n-turf perfection.
Dessert was a tres leches — vertiginous shards of white chocolate crisps jutting out of a milk-saturated sponge cake. It came floating in a pool of lavender-scented custard, a textural marvel that tasted every bit as divine as it looked.
Kode resets the code for decadence, if you can stomach the price.
(HT pays for all meals and reviews anonymously)
