Banana Leaf rice @ Sri Paandi (PJ)

The Indian cuisine is one of the few fascinating ones where they use a lot of nuts, roots and leaves in there cooking. If you go to an authentic Indian restaurant, a common serving on most tables would be the banana leaf rice. It is basically just white rice, with some dishes, normally 3-4 vegetable dishes, and lots of curry gravy drenched all over the rice, served on the banana leaf instead of a plate.
The best thing about the banana leaf rice is that it is a free flow. So it is all you can eat, and the waiters’ kind of just refill with no questions asked.
Upon seated, and ordered, I was served the banana leaf with white rice. More like a mountain of white rice.

Then I waited fairly long for the vegetables, and the curry. One awful thing here is the extremely slow and inattentive service from all the staffs. And trust me; the amount of man power is like a one worker to two tables’ ratio headcount. So I really don’t get what took them so long to bring the vegetables and curry.

So when it was finally here, they serve 4 vegetables and I like 4 of it.

What the Indians do is, the rice is drenched with an array of curry; dahl, fish or chicken curry.

I extremely love the dahl curry as there was lots of white radish in it and it was really delicious.

On top of that, they also serve this side gravy which is also a perfect combination to the banana leaf rice. One is really brine, and one is very rice in coconut milk. Hence these two were not served as “flooding” amount.

On top of all that, there is the papadam, which is a thin, crisp Indian preparation sometimes described as a cracker.

Also, the Rasam which is a South Indian soup traditional prepared with tamarind juice as base in addition to tomato, chili pepper, Pepper, Cumin and other spices as seasonings.

Lastly, my favourite to go with the banana leaf rice is the pavakka. Mini bittergourd sliced thinly and deep fried with chili flour. It was somewhat slightly spicy, and bitterly sweet from the bitter gourd.

Like most Indian restaurants, the fried chicken, fish, sotong, or fish roe (seasonal) are instantly frying at the main entrance instead of the kitchen. In another words, the open kitchen just for the fried stuff alone is usually in front, right next to the array of marinated poultries and seafood. I picked my all time favourite, the fish roe, as well as the fried chicken.

Now in case you are wondering what else is served here other than the famous banana leaf rice, there is assorted cakes and light bites on a table and customers normally pick their choices and help themselves with it seeing how the waiters took such a long time to attend to them. Hmm…to think of it now, that must have been the strategy for them to make more money. People get restless after a long wait and they’ll eventually help themselves with the many choices of snacks and light bites.

After the main course, there is of course more selection of deserts, which each of it almost tasted the same to me. Probably differences in texture, but they all tasted really sweet.

So I didn’t quite fancy it, although I could recommend the palkhova and the Jelebi. Palkhova is sweet but milky taste at the same time where as the jelebi is a syrupy sweet that is shaped like a slightly large, chaotic pretzel.

Restoran Sri Paandi (PJ)
37 Jalan Dato Mahmud 11/4,
46200 Petaling Jaya
GPS Coordinates: longitude:101°38′ 43″Latitude :3°6′ 21″
Tel: 03-7960 0576
Check out more photos and updates in Foodeverywhere’s facebook page

Love, sycookies