The Bollywood (Telephone: 2456 5653) is a vegetarian Indian restaurant in Qurum Commercial Area right next to CCC. We felt adventurous a couple of weeks ago and decided to give this restaurant a go. The Bollywood has been around for years, it was previously known as Bollywood Chaat, but I do not know a single (Omani) person who has been to it before.
The Bollywood restaurant is all (guess what?) Bollywood, the spacious restaurant is covered with photographs and posters in various shapes and sizes of Indian movie superstars. The crowd in The Bollywood is Indian and mostly families and couples. The Bollywood is not a fancy place unlike Mumtaz Mahal, the cost of food is lower and the service and venue is not as fancy either. I don’t think that it is licensed to serve alcohol because we were not offered a drinks menu. I don’t also think that were seated, we entered the restaurants and had to look for a table ourselves and only after we sat a waiter came to us with a menu.
The Bollywood only serves vegetarian food – we did not know that before sitting down. I personally considered leaving when the waiter told us this, but we decided to just give it a try because were not that hungry anyway. Unfortunately the menu of The Bollywood is not very helpful, it has all sorts of fancy ethnic dish names but they barely had any explanation of what that dish actually was. We asked the waiter for help but he couldn’t explain anything to as at all. So we ended up picking stuff that had pictures of them on the menu. For the starter we had a Tandoor Platter (pictured above – RO 2.500) which was made up of different things which we did not know, some of these things had a texture of minced beef burger but tasted quite unique in a good way, some bits of it were moderatly spicy.
We also had a some paratha bread with cheese (pictured above – RO 0.900) and some buttered naan bread (not pictured – RO 0.450) , the cheese paratha bread was awesome. It came perfectly warm and the cheese inside it tasted amazing.
I very rarely eat rice on regular days, so I always take the opportunity to try out a rice dish if I’m in an Indian restaurant, EVNE WHEN ITS VEGETARIAN… unfortunately though I did not like the vegeterian biryani (pictured above – RO 1.350) of The Bollywood, it was quite spicy, but somehow I just did not like it. I did not like the mix of things they had in it and I thought that it was boring without any chicken.
My friend had a Chole Bhature for his main dish, it was a spicy chickpeas dish that come with funny looking bread.The only memory my friend has of this is that it was too spicy for him.
We decided to also try a new drink at The Bollywood, so we went for Kala Katta (pictured above – RO 0.400), we tried very hard to make the waiter explain to us what it was made up of, but we did not understand one word of what he said, the drink turned out to be some sort of fruit-like juice, reddish-black in coloured, it tasted quite sour and very weird (vimto and laban mix?). It was not cold enough and I did not like it.
At the end we had one starter, two main courses, some bread, two drinks, our bill came out at RO 7.850.
Our dining experiece at The Bollywood was quite *unique* to say the least, the fact that a place is vegetarian will probably be a turn-off to many people. The waiters did not guide us through the menu to help order stuff which we might like. I do not think that I will be going back anytime soon. However, I am sure that a vegeterian Indian family that has an idea of the food served would likely enjoy the place. Others willing to pay a little bit more for a better Indian experience can visit the Mumtaz Mahal instead where there is greater variety in food, the ambience is nicer, and the service is way much better.