Qube Café at the Siesta Hitech Hotel in Kondapur is known for its value-for-money food festivals – it brings regional cuisine promotions to Hyderabad at a very attractive price. Whereas around Durga Puja their Bengali food festival with unlimited Hilsa is a huge hit, they had also done decent Kashmiri, Awadhi and Punjabi festivals in the recent past. Now the restaurant is organizing
Goan Food Fiesta, a celebration of food from Goa and around.
The festival buffet is priced at an attractive Rs 570 on Bookmyshow. It is part of the dinner buffet and includes a wide range of meat and seafood. The buffet is dominated by Goan food, though it has a few non-Goan preparations for the in-house guests.
Goa is a favourite weekend destination for people from Hyderabad, and as a result, food lovers here are pretty familiar with the cuisine. Recently two restaurants offering Goan food have also opened in the city. Fish and other seafood items are popular in this cuisine, which has a lot of Portuguese influence on it. The buffet at Qube Café also had a lot of seafood items in it.
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| Anchovy Fry |
The first dish we tried out was
Anchovy Fry – a spicy and crispy preparation of small nethili fish with sliced green chillies. An ideal dish to go with drinks. Sadly Siesta Hitech does not have a liquor license yet.
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| Mackerel Rechado |
This was followed by
Mackerel Rechado. The rechado paste has red chillies in abundance along with cumin, ginger and other spices. The fish was soft and well-cooked and the dish worked out pretty good for me. Some of my fellow-diners had a tough time picking the bones though.
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| Goan Style Squids |
Goan Style Squids seemed to be an oriental preparation for me replete with a lot of chopped garlic and bell peppers. While not scoring on the authenticity front, it was definitely tasty. The Goan shacks usually have a lot of such preparations with the fresh catch to go with the fenny. There were also other starters on the buffet like
Stir Fried Prawns.
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| Mackerel Pulao |
The main courses had quite a vegetarian dishes –
Goan Style Okra and
Mushroom Fry being noticeable among these. The buffet also had some dishes from Udupi area of Karnataka like the coconut based
Mixed Veg Sagu and the Mangalorean
Chana Gassi.
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| Goan Crab Curry |
Among the non-vegetarian items, the star for me was the
Goan Crab Curry – a coconut based gravy of crab which was simply delightful. Another one I liked was Prawn Balchao, a garlic and chilli based spicy dish, which went well with rice.
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| Chicken Cafrael |
Chicken Cafrael, the green Goan curry with coriander, green chillies and mint scored on the taste front. There was another chicken dish
Chicken Sukeem which I did not like. Coconut based
Mutton Xacutti and
Goan Fish Curry were also on the menu.
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| Prawn Balchao |
With the curries, I missed Sanna – the rice cake which is usually eaten with the gravies.
The dessert platter had
Nevris, deep-fried sweet dumplings stuffed with coconut.
Bebinca the most famous of the Goan desserts was a tad too dry. I enjoyed the
Mango Mousse which was part of the buffet too.
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| Bebinca |
I am no expert in Goan cuisine and would not be able to vouch for the authenticity of most of the dishes. What I can say is that almost all the starters and main courses tasted remarkably good. Also, as always I wondered how the value-for-money buffet at Qube Café packs so many non-vegetarian dishes.
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| Mango Mousse |
The festival is on only for dinner till 4th June. It is recommended for lovers of non-vegetarian Indian food.
Location:
Qube Café
Hotel Siesta Hitech
55E Kondapur, Hyderabad
Telephone: 42420000
Disclaimer: The review is based on an invite from the restaurant. However, the opinion expressed in the post are honest and unbiased.
