Its been a long time since I’ve published a restaurant experience. What better way to get going again than this spectacular Summer menu launch at Aqua, The Park Hyderabad. Aqua has been a popular choice vastly due to the ambience. Its a pool side dining, open to air, a view of the Hussain sagar and some live music that makes it a very popular choice.
With summer taking over, Chef Thimma and his kitchen brigade have curated a refreshing summer menu with fresh produce like palm fruit, jackfruit , mangoes etc.
While I say plant based tasting menu, its not completely plant based but has a lot of options. Lets check them out. #Hyderabadfoodexplorer
The first dish was more like an amuse bouche. It had palm fruit and mulberry in coconut milk. Simple , clean and summer feels. Next up was the Bhel or Jhal muri, a classic snack from the streets of Kolkata. This was very good with a punch from mustard oil.
Mango and jackfruit salad was interesting, the use of slightly ripe raw mango (variety meant to be eaten raw like totapuri) gave it a touch of sweetness. It also had bits of jackfruit , bell pepper curls, lettuce and heat from mango pickle. Caesar salad was another brilliantly presented salad. Not just the presentation, it tasted really good as well. All the components including lettuce, the dressing , baguette slice (croutons in the classical style) played their role.
Quinoa salad with pomegranate and orange segments was good as well. Loved the presentation of the Horiatiki salad, a classic greek salad with a simple vinaigrette topped with a slice of green apple. Next and the last of the salads was another simple yet brilliantly put together watermelon and feta salad. The best one for me, as simple as it gets but great balance of the watermelon, feta , balsamic and arugula.
Moving onto the appetizers apart from the salads we had makai soya chaap, gajar ki galouti, subz bharwan til ki shammi and tofu dim sums. The chaap was pan seared, it had finely ground soya and makai, served in shot glasses with some chilly dip. The gajar ki galouti was a tough guess (to make out which vegetable was the base without looking at the name) for most of us. It had the natural sweetness from the carrot and was high on spice too, i would have preferred very mild spice for the galoutis. They were served on mini saffron flavored parathas. The dimsums were a surprise, didn’t expect them to be that flavouful, it had a good amount of aromatics like onion, ginger and garlic adding a bit of crunch. The scallion , pepper and sesame dip was pretty good too. We also had pita pockets with hummus and Falafel.
It was a great evening with some very good food, live music and good weather too. Summing it up with the final course, the desserts.
We had a trio of desserts that included petit red velvet brownie, coconut, melon and pomegranate rubies and a chocolate pave portion with raspberry compote. The presentation was spot on, not overdoing with the sauces on the side. My personal favourites were the pave and the coconutm melon , pomegranate rubies. The chocolate cake was dense and rich, the raspberry compote matched well in cutting down the richness and sweetness. The other dessert is a simple , refreshing one. It had cut melon and pomegranate in slightly sweetened coconut milk.
The final end was the summer berry and cream cheese verrine and the sorbet. Verrines are basically anything served in a glass, here we had cream cheese mouse and berry compote that were layered and finished with a chocolate flower. That flower deserves a mention for all the hardwork that went in to make each one of that.
That was the end of the tasting menu, attaching the menu for further details on pricing. Also the portions in the pictures above are different from the actual ala carte menu.
