Date Night: The Lodi @ Lodhi Road

Lovely garden restaurant, but don't wear heels if you're planning to sit in their garden section (which is the best part of the whole thing, so you SHOULD sit there) because it's all gravel and your feet will sink into it. Try and score one of the private cabana things. Good selection of wine, the food is kinda meh, order a whole bunch of starters instead, and concentrate on the drinking and not the eating.

Getting there: Drive straight down Lodhi Road, pass one red light after the Habitat Centre and take a U-turn from the next one.

TLR @ Hauz Khas Village

Directions: Park in the Hauz Khas Village parking lot, walk down a little bit and it's to your left right. You'll see the people. 

Ugh, TLR (The Living Room) is ridiculously loud and ridiculously pretentious, but sometimes they have decent live music and it's always been super popular, so I guess the masses have spoken? I've never managed to get a table long enough to actually eat here, but I have fought my way to the bar and they do okay cocktails, so that's good. The dance floor is less of a floor than a space, and you sort of wiggle about, avoiding other people with drinks in their hands before you give up and make your way to the third floor where there is a lovely (normally uncrowded) balcony with seating space. You can no longer hear the music, but who cares? Do you? I don't. It's too loud. Fun fact: if you have guests in from out of town, they will love love LOVE this space, I take all my visitors here and it has always been met with appreciation.

TC @ Adchini

Directions:  Straight from the IIT flyover, passing IIT on your left, keep coming down that road, till you hit a traffic light and TC is on your left. Parking is a bit of a bitch.

Back in the day, TC was IT. And then it was short for Turquoise Cottage and I even named my cat after the bar (although I tell people it's TC for The Cat) and they had a basement section and you could go in and meet everyone you knew. NOW, TC (original) has reopened and done away with the basement, but little else has changed. You can still smoke inside (hello, burny eyes!), there are still people head banging to Rage Against The Machine, it's still very loud, and the crowd is still very young. Hurray! Or not! But, cheap-ish drinks and a chance to go down memory lane--if you like a retro song, in all likelihood they'll play it for you. Be prepared, if you're a short person to get jostled a fair amount.

4S @Defence Colony Market

It's time to revive this blog once more! But this time, I'm being unambitious, and will only do reviews in a single paragraph. (I'm lazy.) (I should be working.)

Also, in case you haven't been following my adventures on Twitter or my other blog, you should know, I've moved back to Delhi, and so the reviews now will be (mostly) of bars there.

Disclaimers over, let's get started.

4S is very cool and kind of like an open secret for most people who are in love with the idea of a dive bar. Cheap drinks, cheap Chinese. Don't be ambitious with your cocktail orders. Stick to tried and tested: beer, rum, vodka etc. It's likely you won't get a table if you get there past 10 pm (except Tuesdays, which seems a bit slow), but if you've been in Delhi a while, you could table hop and find someone. If not, sit by the bar.

4S, Defence Colony Market (and that's FOUR ESS, not fours, as some people think it is.)

Woodside Inn @ Colaba

(How to get there: Get to Regal Cinema, abandon your taxi and cross the road. Just opposite from Citibank is Woodside Inn.)

And, before you ask, new projects have kept me super busy, so I forgot I even had a second blog. Grr. So much to do, so little time. It's Colaba Week here at Toasted Mostly, I feel I give Bandra much too much attention, so we're going to walk up and down the Causeway for the next couple of posts. Cheers!

So, Woodside Inn. In three words: Pretty. Damn. Awesome. Not too pricey, which is surprising and with really good food. I particularly like the cocktails (BLOODY MARYS ARE BLOODY GOOD!), but they also do a selection of beers from across the world. The usual suspects are all there, and some really random ones as well. Worth a shot, if you're a beer afficianado and have an afternoon to kill!

And it's a quiet little place in the daytime, free wifi, which is always a plus, and nice food. (I ordered the four cheese pizza last time I was there with mutton pepperoni, which was slightly overoily but still good).

All in all, I don't have reams to say about Woodside Inn, but it does make for a nice afterparty spot post a talk or an art exhibition or a play around that side of town.

Janata @ Pali Naka

How to get there: Get to Pali Naka, pass the lane for Toto's to your right and the no entry turn for the Pali Vegetable Market on your left. Go up the hill towards Ambedkar Road and about a 100 meters ahead, it's on your left RIGHT. I'm very directionally dyslexic, thanks to eagle eye reader As The Mind Meanders for pointing out my mistake!


If you squish up really close, I can tell you about a place where it's possible to get drunk for under Rs 200. IMPOSSIBLE, you say? Uh, uh, welcome to Janata.

Janata is as much a Bandra institution as, um, the pirated DVD guy outside Toto's, or the export surplus t-shirt stall on Hill Road. The alcohol is cheap, cheap, cheap. There are no frills whatsoever (they used to serve boiled channa with your drinks, but thanks to the word that shall not be mentioned (hint: begins with 'r' ends with 'n' rhymes with obsession) that's not there anymore.) There is an air conditioned space upstairs, but if you're taller than 6 feet you'll have to bend when you walk around. The toilet is unisex and often quite smelly, the water is served in steel glasses, but oh, the alcohol. You can order it by the quarter. This means, you get your little bottle of Smirnoff for the table, plus the mixer or whatever and whee! you're set for the night.

The food at Janata's not bad either, I mean, you've been drinking for a while, I assume, so the food's not really what you're going for. I like the biryani, some people like the chicken lollipops, you know, that sorta thing.

Here's another Janata secret. If it's 2 am, and you've been kicked out of every bar you've been too, you can ORDER IN. Plus food. Isn't that awesome? (Of course, you should also know that nearby Deepak Wines also home delivers till quite late, but they don't do the food.)

Want a place reviewed? Want to review something yourself? Send me an email with the subject line DD review to thecompulsiveconfessorATgmailDOTcom

Bounce @16th Road (opposite Mini Punjab)

How to get there: Get to Pali Naka, take the last right turn before the hill goes upwards, and then when you're down that road, take the first left. Keep going straight until the end of the road, where you'll see Mini Punjab and look opposite that for a place with a chrome exterior and a bouncer.

This is a badly taken picture of my new favourite place (apologies for the quality--cell phone camera). Bounce in Pali Naka is TOTALLY what Bandra has been needing. It's new (yay!) and doesn't play retro music (I heart the 80s, but dude, time for a change, no?) and well, SUPPOSEDLY, it plays hip-hop all night, though the DJ in a desperate bid to get people on the dance floor kept changing genres, so it went from Promiscuous Girl to World, Hold On to (ahem) Uptown Girl and (wheeeee!) Tease Me.

Here's why I like it: primo, it is brand new so not too crowded; secundo, because of aforementioned brand newness the waiters are solicitious and you don't have to wait for a hundred and fifty years to get your order, tertio, couple entry and girls are free (the rest have a cover of about 500, not entry, cover) quatro, the drinks are cheaper than the Shack down the road and the music is more appealing, quinto, the bathrooms are AWESOME, there's this red sink with a tap hanging down from the ceiling and MINTS and PADDED DOOR HANDLES and finally (aren't you impressed I can count in Latin?) sexto, cold enough that you don't turn into a little sweaty piggy after dancing for ages. I love it. Even the LIITs are cheap.

Basically last weekend, my friends and I thought we'd go check out the new "hip hop scene in Bandra" as PROMISED by Time Out Mumbai who LIED. Oh, the perfidy. (Back story: Time Out spoke glowingly of a new club called Sin City that played underground hip hop in the same location as an old shady club we had been to called Pulse. We go there and it turns out Pulse still exists and Sin City is not a new club, just some new hip-hop nights. For shame, Time Out, you got my hopes all up and everything. RESEARCH next time. ) But they also spoke of Bounce and we had seen it before so we thought it was worth a look. Bounce does indeed play (mostly) hip hop and it's fun, the crowd's not too shady (lots of men, but not lechy), the lighting and music volume is just about right and it's basically, yeah, my new favourite place.

Want a place reviewed? Want to review something yourself? Send me an email with the subject line DD review to thecompulsiveconfessorATgmailDOTcom