Swing by Chetak Circle towards Swarup Sagar Lake and you can’t help but notice Cafe Mansi while making your turn at the Shiksha Bhawan Chouraha. A year ago the pure vegetarian Cafe Mansi was extended to an exclusively non vegetarian restaurant Wings downstairs.

Here we go about satisfying the general curiosity of what’s inside. Wings Restaurant is an intimate sitting arrangement – kind of compact including its Dining Hall connected Kitchen. The serving staff are gentle and hassle free.

Rajendra Pawar owns and manages both the eating houses and he’s got a very convenient deal for a group of eaters. If a pure vegetarian guy is stuck amongst a group, he can order vegetarian food of Cafe Mansi sitting in Restaurant Wings for himself, though vice versa is not allowed for obvious reasons.

We ordered food from both the restaurants’ menus to make sure we leave with our bellies full and enough to write about for our readers. So here goes…

For starters, we picked ourselves a bowl of Soup and Chicken Wings Barbeque Sauce.

Cream of Tomato Soup

The soup tottered on the edge of being deliciously flavoured to being a letdown. The toast pieces weren’t prepared carefully as mine were half burnt. As an appetizer, it should have been creamier and thicker living up to its name.

Chicken Wings Barbecue Sauce

Eating Chicken Wings is trickier, keeping sticky gravy off your fingers and anyway after the drumstick getting to the meat on the wings is tough to catch. There were no problems here because unfortunately the gravy seemed to have no barbecue sauce and gaily the fried chicken wings were extra crispy. Still, the dish was delectably tongue-smacking and succeeds in getting hopes high for the main course.

We took Rajendra’s advice for the main meal. Chappatis were tandoori, arrived and vanished unnoticeably!

American Chopsuey

Tomatoes again found us in this dish. American Chopsuey is a recipe which is tricky to master, although is available almost everywhere. Here, it was a perfect blend of crispy noodles and the tangy sauce. It was plainly alluring and sweet in its own way!

Butter Chicken Boneless

Remember the Utterly Butterly caption? This serve seemed to originate out of that thought which pretty much sums up the description of Butter Chicken.

White gravy, Kaju, Magaj, Tomato Gravy and generous dollops of butter makes it so intriguing. Chicken pieces were larger than usual boneless pieces making it more likable. Meets the level of hopes one gets after chicken wings, speaking of which-

Chicken Rara Masala

Not probably as good as butter chicken, but that completely depends on one’s own taste. The Keema Gravy was delightful and the chicken pieces were softer, but still this didn’t attract as much attention as Butter Chicken giving it tight competition.

One should not compare, and thus individually the dish is flavoursome.

Cold Coffee with Ice Cream

This also came in from Cafe Mansi along with the American Chopsuey. Decorated with ripples of chocolate sauce and a scoop of vanilla ice cream, the refresher did its job right. The coffee was mildly strong and thin, felt a little sugarless to me but ice cream set the balance right back to equal plates again.

In a nutshell, expect good food, exclusively non vegetarian unless you call in for help from Cafe Mansi upstairs and a fit of coughs if you aren’t used to breathing in direct infusion of cooking fumes with the air around.

Don’t expect larger than life ambience, paying through your Credit/Debit cards and meeting anyone from staff who isn’t co-operative.

The total bill was Rs 920 and probably the most reasonable standing item would be 7 Barbecue Wings at Rs 150. The most ludicrously expensively priced version was American Chopsuey at Rs 120.

It’s sad to note that only Cafe Mansi’s Menu is available on their website. I’ll try letting them know. Meanwhile read between the lines or check out the Restaurant yourself to have a floating session with Wings!

Happy Weekend.