The Standard

 There are a few eateries we visit quite often. One of them happens to be The Standard, so when we went out to dinner a few nights ago, I decided that I’d cover it in my next post. Conveniently located in sector 4, it’s a stone’s throw away from the campus.

The standard is one of the more wallet friendly restaurants in Rourkela, which means that you shouldn’t expect the same ambience as Mayfair or Posh. That’s not to say that The Standard is a roadside hut – the restaurant is lined with open sofa booths that are lined with cushions. Unlike the flaming wok, it’s very easy to get in and out of the chairs and they don’t make any noise.

When we arrived, we were ferried around the restaurant twice as the waitresses couldn’t decide where to seat us. Things didn’t improve after that, but more on that later. The menu is a toss-up of continental, oriental and Indian. If you’re in the mood for Oriental, you might want to go elsewhere – there are only a handful of Oriental main course dishes and half of them are seafood.

Our order consisted of spicy noodle soup and spring rolls for the starter, followed by chicken biriyani, non veg stir fried noodles cooked in white garlic sauce and assorted vegetables cooked in lemon pepper sauce. The soup arrived quickly enough. It certainly lived up to its name of spicy but there was a distinct lack of noodles. There were hardly any in the soup. The spring rolls, however, didn’t show up until the main course arrived, leaving half our party hungry.

After a considerable wait, the spring rolls arrived with the biriyani, noodles and accompanying curry. Seeing as we had to wait this long, I was expecting the spring rolls to be very special and….they weren’t I’ve had worse but I’ve definitely had better. The noodle dish we ordered was very good. It was full of flavor and the meat was succulent. The assorted vegetables tasted neither of lemon nor of pepper. That’s not to say they didn’t taste good, they just didn’t taste like what they were supposed to taste, which was confusing.

My biggest gripe with these dishes would be the quantity. There weren’t enough noodles for two people and there was way too much curry. We ended up having to eat the curry alone as the noodles simply ran out way before the curry did.

Biriyani is a dish where you fry the meat before currying it with rice. It’s a dish that’s full of flavor. You can imagine my reaction then, when I tried some to find that it had no flavor at all. I’m not saying that it was slightly bland, it literally had zero flavor. I’m actually impressed at what they’ve achieved here. How do you fry something, then curry it and still end up with no flavor?

We decided to end the night with desert. The waiter informed us that all they had was gulab jamun and nothing else. On further questioning, he told us that they found vanilla ice cream and that they could serve us fried ice cream. Now, fried ice cream is supposed to be fried. This had a layer of fried batter placed on top, much like sauce. While it didn’t exactly match the description, it was tasty none the less.

From the awkward shuffle trying to find a table to half the starters being served alongside the main course, the service was very hit or miss. Some of the food was good, some of it didn’t live up to the expectations we had and other dishes were downright bad. If you do decide to eat at the standard, remember : what you pay for is what you get.