Bistro Grill

Critic´s Review

• Food: 3.5 / 5
• Service: 3.5 / 5
• Decor: 3.5 / 5

-By Rashmi Uday Singh

When a restaurant is lousy, I feel sad. I've never empathised with gleeful, acid-pen, smart-alecky foodcritiquing. The restaurant business is fraught with risk, vulnerable to too many variables. However empathetic I may be to the fact that lots of investment, hardwork and dreams go into the making of a restaurant, my duty is to be scrupulously honest to you, my readers. Juhu's Bistro Grill started off as a Lebanese specialty restaurant (I ate here for The Times Food Guide 2012 and gave it high marks) but when I went back a couple of days ago, I was disappointed. Gone was the authentic Lebanese menu, replaced by a mishmash of Indian,Thai, Italian (pizza, pasta) and sandwiches. The chef has changed too. The decor remains the same though. Walk up a few steps, past a pastry display counter into the very white and ornately trellised, wooden-ceilinged, two-sectioned restaurant with a wellstocked bar. Avoidable stringy overcooked tandoori chicken, soggy prawn, and paneer kababs drowned in sauce spaghetti! Even the mezze disappoints (lacklustre hummus, crunchy babaghanoush, salad and French fries). A passable Khao Suey, stodgy wedges of Kahlua and Cointreau mousse, and a more or less empty restaurant compound my woes.