Often the hype surrounding an event/opening is enough to put one off going there. Cue the obligatory society launch party, the hoardings all over town, ‘Bangalore’s first Michelin restaurant’, and other such hyperbole. But Yauatcha really makes you sit up and take notice. It is refreshingly true to the premise that all good restaurants aspire to – cut back the chaff, ignore the designer-bag toting ladies and discover one of the finest restaurants that Bangalore has seen in a long time.
Set up in London in 2004, by Alan Yau, who has also created Hakkasan and Wagamama, both wildly popular London eateries and world-wide restaurant chains. Yauatcha quickly went on to get a Michelin star within a year of its opening, which it has since retained. Yau-at-cha is a play on the terms yum-cha, which means to ‘drink tea’, with dimsum in Cantonese and the surname of the founder Alan Yau.
Yauatcha, Bangalore is the second in India, the first being in Mumbai. The décor is pleasing without being ostentatious, the service eager and knowledgeable but they have deliberately kept the focus on the food. It is based on the concept of a dimsum tea room, and that is exactly what one should have. Dimsum and tea. But what a revelation. I have honestly never tasted Dimsum like this before. Available in steamed or baked versions, they truly are worth making a meal of. Chicken and prawn siu mai, scallop shiu mai and the pork and prawn shui mai were all mouth-watering in their freshness and clarity of ingredients.
The Crispy Prawn Cheung Funis was also a must-have. The poached Peking dumpling, chicken dumplings served in a superlative spicy, tangy broth, left you wanting more. Vegetarians also have a wealth of options before them, the vegetable crystal dumpling, so named because the wrapper is crystal clear with the colourful vegetables inside prettily visible from outside, the shitake mushroom dumpling, vegetable lotus root roll were all very good. The star of the vegetariaan options was the truffle and edamame dumpling – smooth, rich and unlike anything we had tasted before. The mains are also good, the pork ribs were tender and melting, the seafood rice, spicy and bursting with flavor, the colourful vegetable fried rice were all excellent but really stick to dimsum and tea. Good tea at that, orchid, chamomile, mint they have it all. Tea is also supposed to aid digestion, cannot verify this with any accuracy, but it did help in washing down the vast consumption of food we indulged in!
Also they are true to the tearoom concept. You can sit for hours with pots of tea and keep ordering the dimsums in a leisurely way and no one bothers you, no fussy table turning and hanging around the tables here except when you need to order more food or drink. It is all day dining and called ‘progressive cuisine’. A fancy term which just means that the food comes in the sequence in which you order them. There is no starter, main, dessert routine here. Food is pricey, portions are quite small but with food of this quality, you really feel its worth the extra money you pay.
We did just that over the weekend. Ordered numerous pots of tea and still more baskets of dimsums, the kids ate, ran around and the adults slowly descended into that blissful haze that only good food and company can induce and afternoon slowly merged into evening. A great way to end the week.
Kavya Thimmaiah-Prasanna is an Associate Architect with Thimmaiah & Prabhakar and a mom. And when she is not building residential, commercial and recreational projects or doing up the interiors of residences, she is busy travelling to exotic places, reading, sampling food and life and enjoying it all in equal measure.