Taste of the Orient

Many years ago, when the first branch opened at Saki Naka (that’s Andheri East, not one of the H bomb sites in Japan as a colleague of my father’s had once presumed), Mainland China seemed to challenge conventional ideas about Chinese cuisine in the city — everything about it looked and tasted Chinese, but this was not a restaurant owned and run by people of ethnic Chinese origin.

Plus, it was a bit on the fancy side. But it worked and people from all over Mumbai actually found themselves at Saki Naka. Now that experiment has been successfully repeated across the city and country, the latest being a new outlet in the suburb of Bandra.

The big speciality once was the crackling spinach, which was a bit unlikely but a huge hit — deep fried spinach leaves tossed with soya sauce and sesame seeds. It is on this menu as well at this swankier version of the other Mainland Chinas. The decor in fact is quite understated but stylish.

We started with prawn hargoa, which were delicate rice flour dumplings stuffed with minced prawns and water chestnuts. The dumplings were light and flavourful and needed only a smidgen of one of the accompanying sauces — green peppers, chilli mustard and chilli honey vinegar — to give it a welcome kick.

The other starter was a roast duck in spicy plum sauce. This was a slight disappointment, if only because I expected the duck and sauce to be served separately, so that one could maximise the flavour of the bird. Instead, it was premixed and the spicy plum overpowered everything else. If you were lucky to find a piece slightly undercoated, you got the full effect of some excellent duck meat.

For the main course, on recommendation of the very friendly steward, we tried the whole steamed bekti in a soya and fresh ginger sauce. With this, we ordered prawns in XO chilli sauce and plain steamed rice. The prawns were large and fresh but the sauce was a tad too much like sweet and sour prawns.

The kick that you usually get with XO chilli sauce of ginger, green peppers, garlic and onions, was replaced by a sort of sweet tomato red chilli sauce. A bit disappointing but I got the impression that the very friendly steward was trying very hard to cater to “Indian” tastes to avoid being fired up later for providing bland food! The prawns were good, but not exceptional.

The bekti on the other hand was very good. It was lightly steamed and lightly flavoured so you could identify all the spices on your tongue without it getting numbed by an overdose of tastes. In fact, here one could say that the sweet prawns acted as a sort of a shield or a counter to the freshness of the fish.

By the end of this enormous meal, we were quite stuffed and decided on the caramelised walnuts tossed with sesame seeds which were served with vanilla ice-cream. This provided a little sweet comfort without making you feel you had overdone it.

For that, I suppose, you have to go back.

Rating: ***
Meal for two (with alcohol) : Rs 3,000

Mainland China,
6th floor, Shopper’s Stop building
Linking Road, Bandra (West),
Mumbai - 400050.