These days the concept of “Welcome Drink” is to mix soda with sugar and add some flavoured syrup to it. It’s almost like as if they want you to feel full before starting the main meal! And that’s why the Kokam Sharbat that was served as welcome drink in My Boli was doubly refreshing! This is a Maharashtrian cuisine based restaurant and I learnt that Kokam Sharbat and Kokam Soda are quite popular drinks in that state. If they taste like this, it is no wonder that they are so popular! Before talking about the starters, I need to first talk about their Chicken and Mutton Thali. Both from a quality and quantity perspective, these two thalis score very high marks. When they wrote “soup” as part of the Thali, I really expected some Dal soup or something like that! What we got was an actual mutton soup and it’s real been years since I’ve had soup like that! The chicken and mutton curries are also quite tasty and go very well with the rice and chapatis. I would simply go back just for these items, I want to say, but I also had another revelation in life there – that you can have poori with aamras and experience heaven! Oops, I forgot about the starters – we had a veg platter (the kothimbir wadi was the best!) and a full pompret fry. Zero complaints on these items too. I would keep going back to this place for trying out more of these dishes! Welcome to Hyderabad, My Boli!
In Hyderabad, Eat here!
Polar Bear
What a name to choose for an ice cream joint! I like creative names 😊. Their “Triple Luv” truly showers some real ice cream love on you! Infact, they have the best possible combination in this – vanilla, pista and fruit! Topped with some dry fruits and honey, you will really feel loved after having this. And then they have this vanilla ice cream with hot fudge and chocolate cake – named “My DBC”, that was also very good in taste. I also had their Alphonso Mango Falooda and liked it a lot (well it's Mango, so it can't go bad!).
Manchi Baphe
True to their name (which translates to Good Buffet), this restaurant has really wide variety of items in their buffet that so totally justifies their pricing. While the options in their starters and main course are very impressive (especially the non-veg ones 😊), I want to highlight the really great offerings of the desserts in their buffet. The buffet options in desserts are really exhaustive and include some great items such as Tres Leches too 😊. They also have multiple live counters – chat, dosa, pasta, pan, sugarcane juice etc! I’d strongly recommend that you try the dosa with any of the non-veg curries. In addition to all these multiple offerings, the ambience of this place is also quite good. For sure, we will keep going back to this place!
AnTeRa
AnTeRa stands for Andhra, Telangana and Rayalseema. However, only the telugu speaking people will understand the brilliant word play of the place 😊. And true to their name, they serve a wide variety of cuisine from all these three regions + some Chinese too! The Nalgonda Mutton Fry is one of the best mutton dishes I’ve had. The Korameenu fish fry is also very tasty (I also think this is because the fish was also fresh and frozen). Their prawns curry with Bhimavaram Chicken pulao had the taste glands asking for more! We also tried their chicken fried rice, just because it is there on the menu 😉. The place is mostly full and the noise in the place actually makes it more lively too. AnTeRa surely is a brilliant place to go for nice ambience and great food.
Third Wave Coffee
Oh what an accidental find this was! The options they have in their coffee beans, I think is the largest in the city. They’ve showed us nearly 7-8 varieies of coffee beans from which we could choose the flavour we want for the Pour Over. I chose the medium-dark roast option and simply fell in love with the coffee and the place. Their Scallion Cream Cheese Bagel is also good breakfast option, especially it goes so well with the chips they serve along with it. Double Shot Cappucino is also a very good option to sip while you are driving in the Hyderabad traffic!
Taro
Taro is one of the few Asian cuisine places that offers nice real Asian flavours in their menu! Their Tom Kha soup was really refreshing to begin with – their optimal usage of the coconut milk to get the authentic flavour is perhaps one of the best in the city. We had a platter of Chicken and Veg Dimsums – a total of 6 varieties were served and every single one of them was really good. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the names of these dimsums 😊. For main course, I did the mistake of ordering Singapore Chicken Curry. Mistake not because the taste wasn’t good, but mistake because I forgot that this curry also will be coconut milk based, so it tasted like a repetition of the soup 😊. But all this was made by their superb Pad Thai with egg. Especially, the masterly preparation of the egg was impressive 😊. For the first time, I also got to taste Mocha Ice Cream and came to know how rice paper is used in the preparation of this ice cream!
Elsewhere
Interesting name no! Their menu is also equally interesting. They serve Chicken-65 with appam (actually spread over the appam) and it is awesome to eat! Most restaurants don’t serve Lung Fung soup and so it was a good surprise to see it on the menu here – and needless to say it tasted quite good. We also had Mushroom Salt and Pepper which lived up to its name! Grilled Fish with Mustard Sauce was quite filling for the main course. The Pizza was good too but nothing to rave about it though.
Turquoise @Le Meridien
A unit of the Marriot hotels, Turquoise is the name of the restaurant at the Le Meridien hotels in Gachibowli. Their lunch buffet has a good spread of Indian and International cuisine. More than their international cuisine items, I liked the taste of their Indian spread much better. Tikkas, Pulavs and Curries were very filling to have 😊. In their dessert, they had a coconut flavoured pudding which was awesome 😊.
Winnis Cake and Café
Located on the 13th Phase road of KPHB, Winnis cakes are surely a winner 😊. Their strawberry cake and the chocolate cake were really fresh and very tasty. The students of the school where these cakes were cut were also very happy with the taste! This is a veg only place. For sure, more orders will go to this place regularly.
Oki Poki
You see the name and go a little hehe 😊. Their food is also as interesting as their name is. Wild Mushroom & Thai Herb flavoured Sushi was quite an unique dish – I’ve never had this kind of flavour and liked it a lot. To be on the safer side, I ordered Steamed Wonton Chicken dumpling too and wasn’t disappointed at all with it! Oki Poki for sure will keep getting more orders 😊.
Red Bean Café
In recent times, multiple bakeries have opened up on the KPHB 9th Phase road. Red Bean Café is one such café, but what caught my eye was the various Medovik pastries they offer. These pastries are honey based and I had a Russian Medovik for the first time in Concu. Red Bean Café serves different varieties of these medovik cakes and they don’t disappoint you much. Their sandwiches are also quite tasty but their offering is their cappuccino! I think they also do double shot by default, like how Smoky Box Organic does!
Qaffeine Qoffee
Well, the name says what you should have there. I liked their coffee – the hot double shot cappuccino and the classic cold coffee. They do serve snacks but I haven’t tried them out yet.
My Fishing Boat
The location of this eatery is very interesting. It is located under the Hitech City Metro station, just a floor above the pavement! And is also one of the few places that serve proper pan fried fish 😊 – and to top it all, they use the Black Pompret fish (also called Roopchand!) for this fry. The fish fry had the correct spice levels, was cooked perfectly and tasted perfect too! We also ordered some Chinese from here but nothing much to write about those dishes 😊.
Shoyu
My brother calls me and wonders why I haven’t ordered from Shoyu yet! Unable to bear that pressure (😝), I placed an order. And then I realised why my brother was putting so much pressure! Shoyu serves some real tasty and excellent Asian cuisine – my favorite (like many others) is their Trufle Asparagus and Avocado Sushi. I’ve probably had it some 3 times in the past one month! I liked their other Sushis and Dimsums too – Spicy Chicken Shumai, Pan Fried Chicken & Rice Paper Dumpling, and their Katsu Chicken Roll. Their packing is very neat and you get a good portion of Wasabi as a side 😊. Shoyu is quite costly though but it’s understandable why it’s so costly too!
Tewari’s
Not only is this a Veg only place, this is also a place that serves NONG – No Onion, No Garlic 😊. Almost everything that we ate here was awesome – their chats are great to begin with (especially the Dahi Puri); their poori with alu is awesome; their noodles with Manchuria is one of the best veg dishes ever – this dish has that right amount of spice that will make you go gaga over the Manchuria sauce and the noodles! This is located right at the Khairatabad junction.
The Symphony
A veg only place located in Filmnagar. It had been a while since I had tomato soup so we ordered the Roasted Tomato and Basil Soup, which was yummy! There are very few places that serve Feta Cheese with Watermelon and The Symphony is one of them. And if that item is on the menu, then it has to be ordered! I loved this dish here 😊. We also had Chinese Bhel, and the only reason I remember the dish is because of the name 😃. Sphagetti with Pesto sauce was also good (atleast I liked it!). The ambience of this place is quite good and is a nice place to go for a good veg lunch.
Satti babu Biryani
There was this period of a week or two, where when you open facebook, one of the first reels that was popping up was Sattibabu Biryani! And the short reel was indeed very appetizing to watch. Their concept is simple – very tasty bagara rice accompanied by chicken or mutton or prawns, according to your choice. And now if video is so appetizing, then why would I not order it? And then in the ordering platform, I see that the ratings are not very good. I go ahead and order it anyway, and then realise why the ratings are so low! I ordered joint-piece biryani. What they sent was a deep fried Chicken Joint piece and the bagara rice. The chicken wasn’t as tasty as it looked in the video! The rice was good, but my next order will definitely not be a joint-piece biryani. Will give this place one more try with mutton and then decide what to do!
Ohri’s Cake Nation
I occasionally order cakes from here while visiting schools and have always found their cakes to be fresh and tasty! Especially their Chocolate Truffle Cake and Black Forest Cake are very good and I’ve repeated these specific orders atleast 2-3 times. The children at the school have also given overwhelming feedback
SV Pulav and Sea Snack
I’d recommend that you directly order from Swiggy/Zomato instead of going here to pick up. This place is basically run by the same folks who run the Hibachi meat shop, in Kukatpally. Their Pulav is truly one of the best in the town – you can try either the chicken or the mixed pulav. You may complain about the quantity of chicken in the pulav but you will forget all that once you start eating the pulav! Their Fish Fry and Chicken Fry are also very good – these are deep fried dishes but retain a very good spicy taste!
Meenakshi Parcel and Catering
For simple pleasures of life, the curry points in Kukatpally are the best! Meenakshi is once such place – white rice, chicken fry, Joint Chicken Fry and Mutton Fry were all very nice. The spices weren’t overpowering and that’s what made me enjoy the meals from this place even more.