This gem of a restaurant is tucked in Riyadh’s downtown area in Al-Batha Commercial Center and has also opened an outlet on King Fahd Street in Alkhobar. Classic Restaurant serves excellent Indian food at very reasonable prices. How about two Kerala Paratha for SR1! And a delicious Kerala style fish curry served only for lunch at SR12! And the fish Kumarakkam at SR20 is equally tempting!
You have surely guessed that this restaurant specializes in Southern Indian cuisine, especially from Kerala, a land blessed with spices that have lured traders since antiquity. All the wonderful, Southern traditional breakfast food is available starting with hot, steaming “Poottu”.
To make poottu, raw and parboiled rice are first crushed until the grains resemble coarse semolina. This flour is then mixed with grated coconut, stuffed into the hollow of a bamboo and steamed in an upright position. These aromatic bamboo steamers are fast disappearing, replaced by more practical aluminum tubes. But the poottu still tastes good.
Poottu is eaten with a spicy curry or sprinkled with sugar or with mashed bananas. Bananas are very popular in Kerala cuisine. Sliced finely and deep fried as chips, they are chewy snacks. Cut into bits, fried and dipped in jaggery or sugar syrup, cooked in thick yoghurt and seasoned with chilly, turmeric, cumin seed and curry leaves, they become “Kaalen,” an accompaniment to the main meal.
“Appams,” “kallappams” or “wellayappams,” known in English as “hoppers” are also featured on the menu. These rice flour pancakes have soft, thick, white spongy centers and thin, golden, crisp, lacelike edges. To achieve this harmonious balance of textures, special rice flour made by rhythmically pounding both ordinary and parboiled rice in huge mortars is used. The rice flour is then mixed with a little sugar, a little cooked rice paste, and the tapped sap from palms. The batter sits all night, seething and bubbling. Next morning, it is thinned out with coconut milk and ready for use.
There are many ways to eat an appam. For breakfast, you can spread it with a layer of butter and jam or honey while it is hot or eat it with a curry as bread.
Dosas rice pancakes are also popular in the Southern states of India. A dosa is thin, round, golden-red, crisp and smooth on one side, white, lined with concentric ridges and slightly yielding on the other.
The dosa can be eaten with chutneys or pickles; it may be stuffed with spicy potatoes or curries.
They are light and easy to digest and are served at breakfast, for snacks, and at main meals as well. Incidentally, in the Southern Indian states, especially in Kerala, filtered coffee (coffee was brought by the Arabs to India’s West Coast) served with milk is often preferred to tea at breakfast.
The menu features prominently Kerala’s mildly flavored cuisine starting with Kerala’s delicious dal with coconut milk. This dal is made with “toovar dal” or yellow split peas and coconut milk. The highly aromatic curry leaves, whole black mustard seeds as well as browned shallots perk up this dish and give it its characteristic taste. The tiny dark round mustard seeds are used throughout India for seasoning everything from yoghurt to beans. When popped in hot oil, they impart an earthy sweetness.
The menu offers a large variety of vegetable dishes including vegetable jalfrezi, vegetable makhahwala, vegetable korma, chana bhindi, palak paneer, vegetable kolhapuri, vegetable malabari, vegetable varattiyathu, alu jeera and many more.
However, two of my favorite Kerala dishes are “Kootu” and the wonderful “Thoran,” a dish prepared a la minute. Green chilies, cumin seeds, garlic, shallots, turmeric, grated fresh coconut and finely shredded papaya are placed in a wok with a little water and covered so that the papaya treated as a vegetable cooks in its own natural juices for a few minutes. In the meanwhile, mustard seeds, sliced shallots, red chilies and curry leaves are heated in sesame oil, as soon as the spices begin to pop, sizzle and brown, the papaya and coconut mixture are emptied over them then stirred and voila the thoran is ready.
As for kootu, it is a typical Southern dish neither too thin not too dry so it can be eaten with rice. All kinds of vegetables, pumpkin, carrot, spinach, potatoes, cabbage, string beans, freshly grated coconut and china dal are cooked together and flavored with turmeric, red chili powder, mustard seeds, ground cumin seeds and curry leaves.
Kerala cuisine is renowned for its seafood and Classic Restaurant has a large selection of seafood dishes such as prawns varattiyathu, prawns kumarakam, prawns malabar, fish varattiyathu, fish pollichathu, squid varatty, squid onion fry, crab varatty, prawn masala, fish chatpatti to name but a few.
Classic Indian dishes like biriyani and pulao are also available as well as traditional tandoori specialties such as Reshmi Kabab (SR22), tandoori chicken (whole SR35), fish tikka to name but a few. Last but not least, the menu does include a selection of Chinese dishes since Chinese cooking is India’s favorite foreign cuisine.
Amongst the desserts, I noticed the “Payasam” (5SR) probably the most famous dessert in the South of India. It is a pudding made with milk, moong beans, sugar, cardamom, freshly grated coconut and garnished with fried cashew nuts. I have always had a weakness for the carrot halwa (6SR). Grated carrots are cooked in milk flavored with cardamom pods until there is no liquid left. The pureed carrots are then fried until they lose their milky look and turn a deep reddish color. At that point sugar, raisins and pistachios are added. This dessert is better served warm with a dollop of whipped cream.
Classic Restaurant has a well-organized home delivery service with no extra charge and a professional take-away service.
Classic Restaurant: Great Indian choice for Ramadan
Classic Restaurant: Great Indian choice for Ramadan
