Third time’s the charm at Imbiss, Colaba

Imbiss offers good value for money, with just a few tweaks it could offer fabulous value for money. 

When Imbiss opened in Bandra last year everyone was pleasantly surprised. The green rupee in Mumbai is very strong and no restaurateur has dared to alienate vegetarian customers (well, apart from the older coastal eating houses, many of which include a lone vegetable dish on the menu listed indifferently as Veg). Imbiss however went the whole hog and ignored them all together.

I haven’t had the chance to visit the original Bandra outlet and was therefore quite pleased to discover last month that the second outlet was opening just one lane away from where I live.

In the last fortnight, I’ve visited the restaurant thrice. The first visit was an absolute disaster (the food and the service was atrocious), the second only a partial disaster (service was good and only one out of three dishes was disappointing).

But the third time we were lucky and our last visit, this weekend, we had a good meal. The reason we realised was that nothing we ordered came with a sauce. Many of the dishes at Imbiss are served in a brown sauce; each dish has a different version but all of them are made from the same base HP-soy-stock cube-flavoured brown sauce. The sauce however is so ridiculously over-salted that after a few mouthfuls you feel like you’ve consumed your RDA of salt for a week and you end up wasting a fair bit which is really unfortunate, because the quality of meat and the portion size are pretty good. I think it would be a good idea to ask for the sauce separately.

Imbiss is the Cafe Churchill of this generation. Though the name means ‘snack’ in German, it’s actually a modern, pork-focused spin on old-fashioned Club/ Parsi ‘continental’ food. Some of it is good, much of it is pleasant, all of it has the visual appeal of an inflight meal, but at a brilliant price.

It’s a pretty decent cold cut platter; nothing exceptional, nothing terrible. The portion size is good enough for 3-4 people. The diced cheese in the centre was confusing, we weren’t sure if it was butter or cheese and why they would serve it cut so small when they don’t have spoons on the table. Would make a lot more sense if they had cubed it.

A light dry, a little tough but the bacon bits make it quite tasty. Went well with the English mustard. The rosemary leaf was superfluous.

You can’t go wrong with any made of diced bacon and roughly mashed potato. Imbiss doesn’t either. The diced beets for obligatory colour didn’t interfere.

Again, a bit dry but nice and spicy. If the egg yolk had been runnier it would have been perfect.

Never having hard of this dish before and therefore having never tasted and other version (who the hell makes Romanian pork cordon bleu?) I’d say this was pretty good. Kind of like having a fried ham and cheese sandwich, but with good ham.

Though the pork escalope was just a tad tough and could have been beaten a little thinner, the Schnitzel really was one of the best things on the menu. The meat by itself is quite tasty as is the coating, and the soft sausages add a nice contrasting texture.

With minced celery and diced black olives the potato salad is quite pleasing as are the sausages which, we noticed, were plumper this time compared to a previous meal. The sauce is ghastly.

Imbiss
Pipewala Buliding
4th Pasta Lane
Colaba
Mumbai 400005
Tel: 022 22020455