Pass The Ketchup: The Table

Bombay has changed in so many ways from the city that I grew up in. It has a new name, new buildings, new cars, and yes, new restaurants. Yet so much of what I love about Bombay is what has stayed the same - family, friends and yes, the restaurants. Nothing will ever match the pav bhaji from your neighbourhood "Sagar", the pankhi at Swati or the excellent Indian at Copper Chimney. It is this food I look forward to eating each time I am heading home and always wonder why anyone would bother with anything else while in the city. Bombay, however, is on the ascendancy as one of the great metropolises of the world and, as such, aspires to the kind of haute cuisine that has made New York and Paris such popular dining destinations. It has seen a number of international chefs open up restaurants within its confines over the past few years, from Kittichai to Morimoto and most recently, Alex Sanchez at The Table.

My most recent trip to Bombay was a short one week sojourn, thus not leaving me with much time to meet everyone I would have liked to. Everyone has very "busy" lives in Bombay too, so it was a minor miracle when some of my oldest and closest friends all agreed to make it out to a late Monday night dinner at the table. FM's heatstroke and US's last minute applications notwithstanding, SN, FP, ZV, AM,  AM and I all headed out for a long overdue evening together.

We arrived on time for our 10pm reservation and walked into a very elegant, modern, 2-floor dining room. The Table is well decorated, with a lot of dark wood, plush chairs, dim lighting and candles all around. The floor to ceiling French windows and flowing drapes all make for some pleasant aesthetics although the zebra patterned floor is a little jarring. The Table has some significant structural flaws though - tables are stuffed too close to each other, the cold air from the air-conditioners blow directly on to the diners, and most glaringly, the bar is small and right adjacent to a communal seating table that makes one unable to distinguish between where the bar stops and the table begins. It results in the inability to grab a comfortable drink at the bar, which was made even more evident to us when we had to wait for almost a half hour for our table even though we had a reservation.

The waits continued even once we were seated. Bread was never offered after we ordered, SN's burger arrived only after four different requests and service was never present when you needed it. From what I gather, The Table is aspiring to be one of Bombay's world-class restaurants but it is never going to get there with the kind of service we experienced. There were servers aplenty, but none seemed to know what they were doing. In a continent that is known for its high standard of service, it was almost shocking to see the lack of training that was evident. The Table would do well to poach a few of the excellent hospitality staff from the Taj next door to beef up their ranks.

When the food did come out, it was somewhat of a mixed bag. The Table offers family-style dining, with all the dishes sized to share. Living up to the pseudonym, I took it upon myself to order as many vegetarian dishes as I could possibly get away with. The result was an appetizer / snack selection of gruyere gougeres, a salad of roasted red beets and the crispy truffle polenta. FP had been warning against the gougeres from a previous visit, but I thought they were actually quite good. Airy and cheesy, they made for a good way to start the meal, although they should probably have been a little smaller in size. The beet salad, with goat cheese, orange, mint and pine nuts, was superb and as good as any beet salad I have eaten elsewhere. The oranges and cheese were a perfect complement to some excellent beets and left a clean and fresh taste in my mouth. The crispy truffle polenta was an imaginative dish, akin to mozzarella sticks with roasted garlic mushroom sauce substituting for the marinara sauce. While I enjoyed the first couple of bites of these, they eventually started to taste a little too oily for my liking. We had thrown in some fries for the table for good measure, and while it did come with some cajun mayo, ketchup would have gone a long way to making them brilliant.

A little note about the ketchup. The Table steadfastly refuses to serve any and claims that there isn't any in the kitchen. I'll believe it, but to me, this refusal reeks of attempted pretension and of a restaurant trying too hard to be something it isn't. For a restaurant in Bombay to serve burgers and fries and then not even have homemade ketchup to go along with shows an alarming lack of knowledge of its customer. April Bloomfield may get away with it at the Spotted Pig in New York, but The Table has some catching up to do before it can claim the same standard.

Having taken undue advantage during the appetizers, and in spite of some interesting sounding plates of pumpkin ravioli and rigatoni in porcini bolognese, I felt compelled to limit myself to just a single main course. And am I glad I did, because the spinach and cheese cannelloni in marinara sauce was some of the worst I have ever tasted. The pasta was overbaked and tasted like paper, with the cheese and spinach filing not doing anything to help matters. The marinara sauce was well made but there was hardly enough on the plate. I didn't get past two bites of the dish, leaving me to wonder if I would have been better served by some of the other choices.

Having polished off the excellent white wine sangria (with apple juice and melons - really very refreshing), we finally made it to dessert. ZV insisted on the coconut pannacotta, but the rest of us stuck to the more traditional warm chocolate tart and chocolate bread pudding. As expected, the pannacotta was really not to my liking, though the bread pudding and banana gelato were actually quite good. The warm chocolate tart was by far the highlight of the evening though - the dark melted chocolate oozing over the baked pastry ensured that the night would at least end on a high note.

This most recent trip back home was one of the most memorable I have ever had, not least because I got to watch India lift the World Cup of cricket for practically the first time in my life. It had been a long time coming but when it arrived, it was definitely worth the wait. Unfortunately, if that was the feeling that The Table was aspiring to invoke among the foodies of Bombay, it is missing by quite a margin. There are glimpses of brilliance, but there is much room for improvement - ketchup or no ketchup.

The Table is located on CSM Marg in Bombay's Apollo Bunder. Moderately Expensive. Veggie Friendly. Ambivalent.




Photo Credit: ZV