The best part of being a blogger, a food blogger at that, is not that you get to try new cuisines and sample dishes at up and coming restaurants. Well, it is a very enticing to be sure but it's not the best yet. Okay, fine! Who are we kidding. It is absolutely mindblowingly fantastic that we get to hog on to all that delicious food. But other good thing that we found out was meeting like-minded, food loving folks whose love for food sometimes surpasses the need to pick up your parents from the airport. But well, such is the pull of true love.

Mr. TKD and me, we squabble a lot. Quarrels leads to fights and periods of 'cold treatments', but no matter how angry you might be or how right you were at your position, you know you have to swallow that pride and sulkily talk if you want your ritualistic Kukkad eat-outs. We are not very social and at the end of the day we only have the other to go out with. This is a serious situation, y'all.

So one fine day we got an invite from a team of food bloggers and enthusiasts, uncannily called The B Team, asking us if we'd join them for a wine and food tasting event. We, of course, said yes. (We are big gluttons like that) It was a friday and much relieved the week was behind us. We arrived at the spot, The Bridge at Clarks Inn Tarawade off JM road. We were having a tiff as usual but we did behave ourselves. The B team were a pretty cool bunch of food fanatics who make it a point to go out and try new places and they are always gracious enough to invite other poor folks such as us. The event was in association with an exciting new food app, aptly called the FoodieApp and Rhythm Winery.


Rhythm Winery is brand that focuses on fruit wines and has a line of exciting flavored wines such as Alphonso, Peach, Kiwi, Strawberry and Plum. The Winery had sponsored a wine tasting session for the bloggers in attendance and we got a class on 'See-Sniff-Sip-Summarize' way of wine tasting. We were given out the Peach and Alphonso wines to taste. The Alphonso one had a yellowish hue and at the first go it smelled and tasted, as the general consensus went, quite like 'mango bite' the sweet. But it did grow on us as we sipped along and it might have preferred it over the other one. The Peach wine had a subtler flavor of peach and was a nice sparkly liquid. Mr. TKD appreciated it by downing copious amounts of Peach wine which probably means is his favorite.



The fruity wines are created by blending fruit wines with grape wine separately. They are usually served chill so as to not let the flavor overpower the palate and go smoothly with the spicy Indian fare as we soon found out.

The dinner was organised by Clarks Inn Tarawade, which is considerably new in the Pune food scene.  Based out of Lucknow, Clarks Inn has a formidable presence all over India and they are branched out as resorts, hotels, restaurants and lot of other projects. In collaboration with Tarawade group, there are many new projects in pipeline for them. The Bridge is a multi-cuisine restaurant specializing in North Indian, Chinese and Continental. Since Clarks Inn has its roots in Lucknow, The Bridge had planned out a Lucknowi meal for us.

Our tables had bread baskets with bread sticks and bread rolls in them. We had already started nibbling on the bread sticks, famished as we were, by the time the starters arrived. The starters had PANEER TIKKA, PANEER HARIYALI TIKKA, MUTTON SHEEKH KEBAB AND FISH TIKKA.


PANEER TIKKA and PANEER HARIYALI TIKKA comprised of chunks of soft and moist cottage cheese, marinated in their respective spices and grilled to perfection. The PANEER TIKKA was nicely spiced and cooked to our liking. It went quite well with the green dip that was served. The HARIYALI variety had a green marinade and cheese on the paneer chunks. However, it tasted a bit under-seasoned to us. The tikkas were good but not exceptional considering their speciality in Lucknowi cuisine.




MUTTON SHEEKH KEBAB was minced mutton rolled on to skewers and tandoored to deliciousness. The spices really played to our tastes and we loved how succulent the meat was given that it was mutton.


The winner for us was definitely the FISH TIKKA. We are not really fish people but we had to hand it to the chef, this made us love fish. The boneless pieces of fish were so fresh and tender, the meat was falling off. It was grilled to the perfect crispiness and the spices we the right amount of pungent and zesty. We really couldn't have enough. And it went really well with our fruit wines.


The main course had VEGETABLE BIRIYANI and MUTTON BIRIYANI. We had already stuffed ourselves with so much starters that we decided to just have a taste of the mutton biriyani. At first, we didn't really like it as much. It seemed bland and the rice didn't really impress us. But it seemed our server had served us with just the top of the bowl of biriyani and the spices were mostly in the bottom so it required a good mix. The spices were aromatic and flavorful, however the mutton pieces were a bit too stretchy to bite. Also, the dish was quite pungent though the raita did take the edge off a bit. However, having had my fair share of biriyani in Kolkata, where it is revered as the food of the kings, I wasn't as impressed.


For dessert we were served with hot GULAB JAMUNS with a dollop of ice-cream and chocolate sauce. The plating was quite ingenious and the warm gulab jamuns went well with the ice-cream but at the end of the day it was just a gulab jamun.


The Bridge might be a good place to dine in if you want to experiment with North Indian fare. The ambience is pretty nice and service is decent.

We mostly loved this tasting because we met fellow-bloggers who are fun and as enthusiastic about good lighting on a Gulab Jamun as we are. (It is quite exasperating eating out with our 'normal' friends who are subjected to 'wait-don't-you-dare-eat-I've-not-clicked-a-picture-of-that-yet' treatment every time a new course comes in. Yes, exasperating for them.) A big warm thanks to Maanas, Divyanshu, Vaibhav, Neel and Arvind for having us over and big love to the other partners-in-crime. We had a great time hanging out with you guys and maybe we will hang out more often (here's hoping).

For us, TKD, it was a silver-lining, making new 'food' friends which means smooth cold wars with uninterrupted quibble until one decides to yield without calling unnecessary meal-time truce. Life looks good right now.