Koshy's Restaurant Review 
Bangalore, Dec. 2024 
Rating : 2.5 stars / 5  (Above Average) 
 
ROASTED NOSTALGIA AND CRISP BUSINESS 
 

If you were a youth in 1970s Bangalore, breezily checking out a restaurant for snacks, coffee, even a meal, and wanted that same space, menu, zeitgeist right now as we enter 2025, there remain only a handful of places of such formidable staying power. Of this rarefied set, if you crave a smorgasbord from Continental to Indian to Chinese to everything in between, then Koshy's is likely the only one - in a league of its own (never mind that dish quality is a separate matter from rich historical value). One thing is for sure - this joint ain't going broke any time soon. On a Friday lunch session, despite the mild deterrent of robust menu prices, the place with nearly all of its 25 tables or so was operating to roaring capacity and chair-vibrating din. 

You have a better chance of finding and speaking to Hon'ble Shri Narendra Modi than of flagging down and speaking to a Koshy's waiter. For your first order, they will come to you but good luck after that - you might as well go out, smoke a cigarette, drink from your hip flask and shoot paper rockets till you are the only one left in the restaurant. 
 
Stone floors, cream painted walls, three solid pillars than run through the middle, laminate topped wooden tables, and comfortable cushion-embedded chairs complete the set-up. While the tariffs will ensure the margins, the toilet fit-out is not up to high standards. 
 
Middle-aged clientele dominate and you will rarely see a table of youngsters, with Koshy's seemingly caring a fig for Instagram but in that bracket of vintage, you will see a wide and colorful swathe of Bangaloreans both male and female patronizing the place and tucking into its multifarious menu. 
 
The menu is unique in Bangalore - mofussil meets cosmopolitan. You will get everything from chicken curry with rice to veg. cutlets to grilled pork chops to mutton noodle soup to caramel custard.  Naan is billed at Rs.80, Chicken Biryani at Rs.480 and Fish and Chips at Rs.750. The menu has close to two hundred items and in case you were looking for something more, there's the seasonal Christmas Menu offering Roast Turkey (Rs.990 with the menu promising you "delicious slivers of free-range turkey pot-roasted in traditional English style, served with brown gravy, ham, stuffing, roast potato and veggies) to roast duck (Rs.800)
 
 
 
 
I had been greatly impressed with the Veg. Cutlet here ten years ago, so it was ordered this time with anticipation. Unfortunately it lacked the sharply calibrated taste and texture of remembered yore, and I wasn't the only one at the table underwhelmed by this expected classic. Crumb Fried Chicken was a bigger disappointment. Nicely carved pieces sumptuously fried would have hit the mark but what we got was a big hunk of bone-in chicken, the meat quality average, with the overall cookery of the hum-drum type found in a thousand roast meat shops the world over. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
It came with small pieces of vegetables - beans, carrots, and cabbage - that were vinegar-pickled but they tasted off and spoilt - no top restaurant in its right mind would send out such travesties (the back of the menu quotes "Quality is not an accident") but peddling quotes is different from ensuring day-to-day rigorous practice. Both plates came with French Fries - these were limp, tired and tasteless. Instead of treating French fries like useless accompaniments plonked on every plate, a more diligent kitchen would have deployed them more strategically, selected and cooked with more care. 
 
Chicken Sandwich was far better, the white bread's edges cut off, nicely buttered and filled with cuts of soft chicken - agreeably mild and pleasant in taste - an excellent English tea snack. Butter Fried Fish had two large hunks of fried seer fish (not the ersatz basa) - basically a high quality Fish and Chips minus the chips which were again hopeless. The fish was not of the most flavourful quality often found along coastal Karnataka but that is a minor quibble considering the generous thick moist seer fish fillets (Spanish Striped Mackerel) expertly fried Western-style. We finished with coffee which was strong and satisfying. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Waiters can get very hard to get hold of when the room fills up (a no-brainer but worth mentioning to prepare newcomers for the visit). I was trying to search for our waiter for the second round of ordering and saw two others standing at the back and having a word with each other. The bespectacled senior of the two saw me signaling for service but majestically ignored me, slowly nodding to his colleague while glacial surveying the restaurant like a prime minister who sees his minions but could not be bothered by them.
 
My father did not want to come back here (the noise put him off, and there was more than one disappointment on the menu, with the service experience being flat and mostly absent). As for me, I'm not doing cartwheels but just like there's Something about Mary, there's Something about Koshy's. It is neither simbal nor humble. It may be the supreme flavour of nostalgia, stupendous menu range, occasional impressive dish, service where the tables are turned on the power balance. Despite all the negatives, the tides here still surge towards the mystically positive. 
 
 
 
 
 
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