Subscribe to the BlogThe suffix "ing" perhaps can potentially turn almost every noun into a verb, hence when we decided to have lunch at café Koel just like everyone else we too called it Koeling.
Café Koel is the word of town these days. A lot of us never knew what Koel actually was until they opened up a sideline café which pulled the youth of Karachi - who is highly fond of eating out – towards its self, this is what we call diversifying and targeting a new market. Prior to introducing a café, Koel was exclusively an art gallery and a showroom of national & International crafts.
Café Koel, owned and operated by Noor Jehan Belgrami & Rasikh Ismail, located off 26th street, block 4 Clifton, Karachi is a little world of man made serenity away from the racket of bustling streets of Karachi. The place looks magnificent in bright day light with the sun rays peeping in through the tree tops, without doubt all light lovers will fall for it the moment they step in through the carved wooden door and I wonder what’ll be the impact of moonlight on this tiny block of beauty. We had an option to be seated either outdoors amongst the water body underneath the tree shade or indoors with a brilliant view of the garden outside and we opted for indoors since it was a bit too hot to sit outside plus we were in no mood for botheration by the love-y dove-y mosquitoes of Karachi.
Moving over to the food, the reason we landed there, we ordered an appetizer of sesame chicken with a sideline of fries and a dip, tasted good enough yet the dip was mainly creamy with no taste. Our main course consisted of 4 different platters, one for each, the reason behind making sure they weren’t same was so that we could taste as many things possible off the menu. Mine was grilled chicken breast with zesty prawns with a side line of garlic rice & vegetable skewer, I can so notice your mouth open in surprise & your head repeating over and over again “this girl eats a lot” but sadly when the dish arrived my mouth dropped open at seeing the unbelievably tiny serving size. Anyhow mine was still sufficient as it had a small yet double variation of sideline but this other platter we had ordered called parmesan crusted fish was precisely a single flat petite fish fillet with a dip which happened to be tastier than the fillet. The other 2 dishes were also disappointing and scarcely lying amid the white ceramic plates, one of them had some surprisingly bland salsa despite us knowing that the Mexicans love spicy food and salsa is from Mexico. End of our main course.
All of us ordered lemonade for drinks which they called “squanjaibeen”. Liked it! No defects there. Ending our day at Koel we ordered their famous chocolate pudding, out of which oozes hot chocolate sauce. Oh my, it sure was yummy-licious!! However 2 of my friends said it had a tinge of Ovaltine’s taste, I’ve never tasted it so I can’t say much about that but I loved the freshly baked pudding for which we had to wait 20 minutes.
Overall, it’s a worthwhile experience because once you are at the café you are most likely to visit the Art Gallery and the craft exhibition which you wouldn’t have otherwise as maybe you don’t have time or art is just not your thing.
Ambiance = 10/10
Food taste = 6/10
Food presentation = 9/10
Serving Size 6/10
Visit Cafe Koel for more info on Koel & viewing its pictures.
Tel: (92-21) 3-530-9745
Author Bio: Hebah Mushtaque Tufail (HMT)
A textrovert, as Urban Dictionary describes it, flown in from an oil rich monarch run country into a so-called democratic yet politically unstable homeland for higher education. Each & every day I want to crawl back into my 17 year old personalized niche in the foreign land but I guess I’ll miss my own anarchic country. Everything that could go wrong in this place did go wrong nonetheless I am a proud owner of Pakistan! - You can follow her at Twitter. She blogs at Textrovert.
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