Restaurant review: Fish N Bait

Decor
What seems to be yet another multi cuisine restaurant in the Lunkad Sky Cruise space in downtown Viman Nagar turns out to be quite a good fine dining seafood restaurant. Tanks of ornamental fish, air conditioned interiors, brown and ice blue décor — it’s smart. Outdoor has a small smoking terrace with a few tables too.
Food

The chefs are from North India and Nepal, but the owner of the entire building also owns Mahesh Lunch Home and the cooks here have trained under the Mumbai team.That is evident from the level of expertise in the Mangalorean recipes. There are some hits and misses but all in all, the seafood is extremely fresh and caters to the spicy expectations of the locals. Rava fried bombil or prawns are avoidable until they change to a finer dust of rawa rather than a full thick coating. Many of the items, though tasty are deep fried, like the popular prawns chilli garlic butter which you think will be like the buttery Mumbai version. It isn’t. What is surprisingly good is the tandoori pomfret in a coating of home-made tandoor masala. Then it just gets better and better. The crab sukha is a Southern coastal preparation rich with coconut, pepper and curry leaves. Fabulous. Mop the masala up with soft neer dosa. The surmai gassi which followed, the familiar thick coconut gravy from Mangalore, was outstanding. Perfect flavour and texture. The appams were unfortunately not as light as they should be. The ‘must have’ of the meal is the ghee roast prawns, a wonderfully pungent aromatic dish from Mangalore. The masala is a finely ground paste of two types of red chillies, coriander, cumin, methi, garlic and tamarind. The masala is cooked or “roasted” (a deceptive culinary term in South India which actually means ‘fry in oil or ghee’ not roast in an oven). The difference between ghee roast and other masala dishes along the coast is that the prawns are marinated in lime juice, turmeric, pepper, salt and curds (yoghurt) before being added to the cooked masala. The result is a delicious but far from ‘light’, masala prawn cooked entirely in ghee! Since all the restaurants in the building belong to the same owner, you often find borrowings in terms of dishes and desserts coming up from Shiv Sagar on the ground floor to going up to Butterfly High on the second. Service is attentive and there is a full bar license. There are plenty of vegetarian, chicken and mutton options for non-sea food lovers.
Plus and Minus: Good location