Swaadhisht

Whilst looking for a lunch destination in the neighbourhood, I chanced upon Swaadhisht, a no-frills restaurant which serves food from the Kerala region in India. The scent which is used for the restaurant takes a bit of getting used to, but once the food comes the aroma of the food will take one's mind away from that.

We tried the Palak Paneer ($7.50). This is not a south Indian dish and the version served here is also different. For one, the spinach was not mashed up and so there was some mix of leaves together with the blocks of Indian cottage cheese. It was tasty, except that one has to look out for the occasional green chili paddi that roams around which may give you a rude shock when bitten, yet another modification to the traditional north Indian dish.

I also tried the Malabar Meen Curry ($9). Whilst it was recommended by the waiter, this is a fish curry which I felt did not stand out. Unlike the typical fish curries, there was no sour after finish and hence the dish tasted more like chilli fish as the curry flavours did not stand out. It did not help that some of the fish had a "fishy" after taste.

My favourite dish of the afternoon though had to be the Malabar Goat Meat Briyani ($16). The rice here is unique in that saffron is not used. But do not expect anything light as ghee is used to ensure that it is still a heavy dish. The goat meat was tender and well marinated.

Overall, whilst the portion may be small, expect to be stuffed as the food tends to be on a heavy side. A tea, or two, after the meal would certainly help here.

Service is friendly, what one would expect from a typical restaurant.

This restaurant is a little hard to find. It is hidden away on Chander road. It is well worth the effort to go find the place. It serves fantastic Kerala food on a plantain leaf. Their menu has a good mix of traditional Kerala specialties like Aapam, Puttu etc as well as the normal dishes you would expect in an Indian restaurant such as Naan, Rotis etc. I had the Biryani one time and Veg meal next time. Both were excellent. The service is attentive and courteous and everything is served fairly quickly as well. All in all a fantastic find in Little India which I strongly recommend. 

PS: They are not a vegetarian place as it should be expected for a Kerala restaurant. A friend tells me that their fish curry rice is very nice.

It's definitely as good a Kerala cuisine retaurant as you can get in Singapore. Staying true to the tastes of Kerala, Swadisht delivers great food at reasonable prices. In my opinion the Appam and Chicken stew is the best. Hot steaming chicken curry (with curry leaves and cocount milk) with cripsy white Appam is mouth watering just at the thought of it (for those who love the traditional Malayali 'Appam and stew'). The Biriyani is excellent too and for $9 (or 10) even the most hungry souls will have their hunger satiated. Meals stay true to the traditional kerala meals. In all, no complaints - it's a food places that's tucked in from the glare of commercial shopping and a delight for those who know where it is. 

My colleague who is Malayalese brought us here when we requested to try authentic Malayalam food. She said that the food here was really authentic, the kind her grandma would approve of, which really says something.

We came at 12 for lunch and it got packed quickly. Service was a little slow, perhaps due to the lunch crowd. We had to ask for our papadums to be refilled and our drinks took 10 mins to arrive. My colleague ordered for us and the food took 15-20 minutes to arrive - pretty slow on hindsight.

However the food was so good, it made up for all that. We had the following :

Chicken Dum Briyani - The rice was wonderfully flavoured with its sauce. It was so tasty and fragrant I kept on sniffing my fingers after we had left. This has to be one of the best briyani I've ever had.

Tapioca with fish curry - According to my colleague this is a really traditional Malayalese dish. Its tapioca which has been stewed till soft, then served with fish curry separately to be drizzled on top. It was rather good by my standards, though not a dish I am accustomed to. My other colleague raved about it all the way back to the office.

Appum with Coconut milk - Another very traditional Malayalese dish. My colleague commented that their Appum served that day was not as good as it had been previously, not fluffy enough she said. I can't comment cuz I've never had Appum before! But the coconut milk served separately was so fragrant and fresh. The Appum itself tasted like thosai to me.

Plain naans with Butter Paneer Masala - Wow this HAD to be the best dish of all. I know it isn't southern indian cuisine technically speaking but the butter paneer masala was so delicious I thought I had gone to heaven when I tasted it! The paneer is tender and soft and utterly fresh tasting unlike some places' paneer and the butter masala sauce was so good, rich and tasty I could eat it all day with just plain naan. Thinking about it makes me hungry again.

Mango lassi and Masala tea - Very good. The mango lassi was just nice, a little sweet, a little tangy. Masala tea was powerfully spiced, the way I like it.

Payasam - They had vermicilli payasam served that day which was free. Sweet, thick and soft, just the way I like my desserts.

The bill came up to about $40 which was split among 4 of us. We were so stuffed we could barely move.

In conclusion Swaadhist has really good authentic Indian food. A pity about the slow service and kitchen though, but I would gladly wait rather than compromise on the quality of the food served.

I love Swaadhisht's Kerala Prawn Curry. For lack of better description, the curry sauce reminds me a lot of butter crab - just with an extra kick of spice and fresh shelled prawns in lieu of crab. A more flavourful, easier-to-eat version of butter crab, what's not to love?

Aside from that, I also adore their Mutton dum Briyani. Think fluffy grains of rice with fragrant fried shallots sprinkled on top with oh-so-tender chunks of mutton hidden within. You'll need to mix the sauce surrounding the mutton well into the rice, or the latter may end up a little tasteless. (But that's fine if your plan is to save it for other meat-curry dishes.) When you do, you get a really tasty bowl of rice big enough to feed two smaller eaters. Be warned though: little bits of chilli spots lie within so if you don't mix your rice carefully and shove a spoonful of that 'hotspot' in your mouth, you are in for one tongue-numbing session!

A friend ordered their Naans and Butter Chicken. The flavours of the rich, buttery sauce was absolutely infused into the moist, tender chicken and together went really well with the un-mixed Briyani rice. I like. The Naans on the other hand, were a little dry for my liking but I'm never really a Naan person anyway.

The service at Swaadhisht was attentive without being overbearing. You rarely see the waitstaff around but getting the attention of one is never a problem when you need help. A waiter saw us tearing from the Briyani and kindly presented a portion of a warm almond-rice-milk dessert, perfect for dousing the spice of the chilli. And when our papaddum basket got empty, the staff kindly refilled it while a smile when we asked for it.

And the Gulab Jamuun! I always like ending my meal on a sweet note, and I sure did with their piping hot ball of syrupy fried dough. (:

I was admittedly drawn to this place while walking behind the lanes of Race Course Road (47 Chander Road, tel : 6392 0513) because I saw that there was goat bryani on the menu. The manager of the restaurant had stepped out to explain the differences between the regular mutton bryani which he claims to use mostly Australian lamb and the goat variety which uses, well....goats from Malaysia which he also added was more expensive. I was generally sold right at the start since I wanted to try it.

We started off snacking on some onion pakora which were freshly fried while waiting for the rest of the food to arrive. These are pretty tasty and there were actually garlic chips amongst the pieces of battered onion. Would make an excellent beer snack. There was also a horrible corn soup with some pitiful bits of sliced canned mushrooms. I wouldn't have ordered them if not for being misled by the pictures on the menu. I didn't think that anything that had ingredients could taste so bland.

The malabar goat bryani which was $16 a portion didn't quite turn out to be anything very impressive. Or for that matter, the portions weren't very large neither. There are actually two versions of the goat bryani that is offered. The other one which is a Thallasseri version used a shorter grained rice from Kerala while this one uses basmati. The flavor of the meat here which had also seeped into the rice from the fat was pretty much like any mutton bryani instead of being more robust as claimed. While it was pretty decent, I wasn't close to being wowed by it in any sense. I must admit that the raita that's filled with onions made the rice really very good in an appetizing way.

There was definitely a need to get some sides for the dinner so here's a butter chicken which was loaded with - apart from tandoori chicken, chopped onions. This definitely wasn't how I had expected the butter chicken to look like, but it was not bad at all being moderately spicy and uplifted by those onions. Somehow, I've yet to come across another one that manages the smoky aroma in the chicken like Jaggi's does for this dish.

Their gobi manchurian was not too bad as well. Apart from the moderately spicy gravy on some surprisingly firm cauliflowers in batter, there was - more chopped onions! Unfortunately, there was a little bit of ginger in there too. I think the rendition here does deserve some note for those distinguishably firm and crunchy cauliflowers since most versions of this serves the vegetable limp after all that pan frying.

There was a nice complementary after dinner sweet that seems to be made of barley. I noted coconut and brown sugar in the dessert along with a very noticeable hint of cardamon amongst other spices.

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The real taste of kerala, authentic kerala food it's great