Tucked in somewhere in Dehiwala in a corner no one really knows about lies Bhai's Biryani; a home-based venture that does biriyani and delivers to your doorstep.
Come Monday afternoon and a desperate need of some sort of comfort food to get us through this rather cold, and slightly depressing week, we decided to turn to Bhai's Biryani for help. Here's how that went.
The Biriyani
This is essentially what the packet of food looks like when you get it delivered. A tightly packed cardboard box filled to the absolute brim with rice and whatnot, coming with a small cup with raita and a piece of chicken packed in foil along with it.
This is the Chicken Biriyani (Rs. 450). Essentially a giant portion of seasoned white rice and a generous piece of chicken, the Chicken Biriyani was, at best, all right.
The rice was a symphony of salty and spicy but lacked that zing that you looked for in a good biriyani. Instead, it more or less tasted slightly liked the ones you make at home. We're not sure if they use a biriyani mix, but, it kind of tasted as they had.
Plus, for someone who likes in a bit of gravy in what they eat, I found the meal to be a tad too dry for my liking. While it didn't necessarily cut it as a solid biriyani, it did cut it as a pretty generously flavourful meal, for which we are grateful.
The Beef Biriyani (Rs. 470) was more along with our liking. Served with the same kind of rice as the chicken, the beef biriyani came with a corner with a portion of super-soft, spicy beef curry that we genuinely enjoyed. Combined with the raita and maybe a hard-boiled egg, this would have been solid.
The Fried Rice (Rs. 420) was a mix of fluffy white rice flavoured with soup cubes, veggies and plenty of egg. You get a small portion of gravy along with the rice to help with the whole dry part of it, but considering how thick it was, it tended to disappear quite quickly. We would have wished for it to last a tad more.
The chicken was essentially just a giant piece of deep-fried chicken, without much flavour coming through from the chicken itself, we thought it was all right. It's fine for the fried rice, but, it would have been brilliant if they had cooked the chicken with the rice in the biriyani.
Conclusion
We do think that a few changes are necessary for them to earn our infinite approval, we're just going to say that this time, they just weren't our cup of tea. The changes they make are very simple, and even then, we still think that they're worth looking out for just because of their potential.
