My Home Kitchen is an Indian restaurant in Silicon Oasis with multicuisine aspirations. Located in Block D of the DSO Hostel Building, its interior looks more like a trendy coffee shop than a curry house. The restaurant’s mantra revolves around home cooked food, specifically (and I quote its website) “an extensive collection of traditional Mother’s recipes handed down through generations”; the reference to one’s mother is such a powerful marketing tool, isn’t it? And these boys and girls flaunt it to the MAX. But in the case of My Home Kitchen, to me at least, home cooked and mother’s recipes = tasteless and bland.
A view from the street 
Interior
The restaurant looked more like a production line when my sister and I visited it for lunch this afternoon. Although there were maybe a dozen people there, we were the only customers. Everyone else was either attending the production line or were delivery boys. And while this was really interesting to watch, it did little to enhance our home cooked dining experience.
Production line… 
…in full swing
My Home Kitchen’s menu is a collection of daily meal packages, different for each day of the week – perfect, I might add, for the student or employee who has no mummy to cook for him or her (monthly packages are also available). There is a small non-combo section from which we ordered their version of PF Chang’s Dynamite Shrimp called…Prawns Dynamite. Although nothing like the real thing, it wasn’t bad at all.
Both my sister and I are on low carb diets and that makes ordering any one of their combos difficult as they all include rice, chapatis and/or potatoes. So, rather than make a fuss, we said to hell with our diet and ordered the mutton and chicken executive boxes respectively. Our attentive waiter replaced Pari’s Aloo Jeera with a kidney bean dish and her rice with chapatis. Her Keema Matar was superb, if a touch salty; she allowed me one taste for this review and gobbled the rest down herself. The kidney beans were forgettable at best. I loved the bento boxes the meals were served in.
Now, I am not an Indian nor do I claim to be an expert on Indian cuisine but believe me, I have been to my fair share of Indian restaurants…world over. I spent many years in India as a child and, for as long as I lived in my father’s house, I remember us having an Indian cook who assisted my late mother (a saint of a woman – like everyone else’s mother). So, I know a little about Indian food…at home and at restaurants. All this detail was for this – the Aloo Jeera and Dal were possibly the most tasteless, bland and characterless I have had in all my 55 years! If my Chicken Tikka Masala hadn’t been so good, I would have sent my food back. I ate the chicken, left the rest and spent the remainder of the meal wondering where the Palak Raita and Dessert the menu promised had disappeared to – hmm.
So, for every dish which was a hit there was one which was a definite miss, hardly the stuff 4.0+ ratings are made of. In my opinion, the restaurant’s stellar rating is not indicative of the quality of food nor the restaurant’s lunchtime ambiance. I give it a Ravenous Rating of no more than 3.0 and believe me, I am being generous.
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Xerxes physically dines at, or orders from, each and every venue he reviews. He pays in full for whatever he and his companions eat, drink, take away or occasionally throw at each other. Xerxes accepts no money, gifts, discounts or free meals in return for reviews or favouritism. What you have read was NOT influenced in any way by the venue. Join me on Instagram @ravenousxerxes or email me on xerxes@dellara.com.