I am not going to mince words. And the chef doesn’t like to mince vegetables.

Pondicherry is a city in southern India. Southern India is beautiful with rich flavors and a variety of cuisines. The restaurant met none of those expectations (it’s got beautiful decor though). I have never started a restaurant, let alone starting a faux-Indian restaurant in Houston and NYC, but the food here sucked.

The plate below came with a dosa embedded with a leaf, a berry compote on said desecration of dosa, and avocado mash next to the compote. I have no idea how these individual items go together on a thali. Perhaps like Ben Carson leading HUD, because someone can make it happen, so it happens; rationality can jump off a cliff. It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone else because at this point what you’re being served is not from a perspective of what you’d appreciate but what the person in charge wants you to like.

The thali continued to devolve into an episode of Series of Unfortunate Events. One of the small serves on my thali was a bowl of uncut leaves. It seemed like a lazy and disgusting attempt at giving the plate some “color”. It wasn’t palatable and served no purpose on the plate. None. Then comes the beet soup. As someone who’s always willing to try absolutely weird sounding vegetarian food, this piqued my interest, and then assaulted my taste buds. This soup was a bland tasting room temperature paste, which was terrible.

Even writing this post is making me relive the confusion and bewilderment I went through and my strong desire to not consume this medley of absurdity.

The avial was whole pieces of broccoli covered in white liquid. What. The. Fuck. Topped with 2 crispy okras. Who serves this?! What the fuck is this?!

The lentil dumpling was delicious.

vishnu: aviyal, smoked eggplant, beet soup + lentil dumpling, dosa 18

This is the second weirdest plate of Indian food I’ve had. The first was what I call the Rube Goldberg of Indian appetizer.