AMRIT - Berlin Kreuzberg — Restaurant in Berlin

The restaurant is very overrated. They put a lot of effort and money in the ambience and service but not on making authentic food. Our assessment is that the chef doesn’t know the fundamentals of cooking and have no clue on how to balance the flavors & spices.

We ordered:

Tomato shorba & Dal shorba - Taste was okay. The soup is supposed to be light and enhance your appetite. However, these shorbas are very heavy and rich. To my surprise, both the shorbas tasted and looked almost the same.

Murg Tikka - flavors are very bland. The chicken pieces are cut pretty uneven, skewed and cooked together. Now, obviously the smaller ones got overcooked (fundamentals people)

Paneer Jalfrezi - Again the vegetables are cut pretty uneven. Some capsicum, cauliflower and onions pieces are thrice the size of other veggies. Now any proper Chef will know what happens when unevenly cut veggies are cooked together (is he really a cook?). Coming to the flavor of the curry, we felt like that we are eating spoons of masala. The spices are not cooked through and blended in the curry.

Biryani - It is a recommended dish from Amrit. This is no biryani people. It tasted horrible. Felt like I’m eating dry spices. Trust me I come from Hyderabad and I know a thing or two about how a biryani tastes.

Pudina Paratha - I guess this was the only item they made without screwing up.

Finally, 2 star for ambience...

I tried the mutton biriyani. I am sorry, but what was served was nothing close to any Indian Biriyani. Very disappointing. Sometimes I could sense the taste of raw spices, which happens if the spices are added late in the cooking process. They had zucchini and carrots in a mutton biriyani which are not really the right ingredients for biriyani. The combination is similar to adding aubergine to a schnitzel. I doubled checked my bill to make sure I have the right thing. They served the biriyani with an Indian salad, which didn’t have a lemon, which is very much a vital part of the salad.

Having spent more than two decades in India and having tasted at least 10 different styles of biriyani, I felt bad to have this, so much so that this was the only restaurant that made me say NO when they asked if things were fine after the meal.

The staff is great and the hospitality is good. They aren’t very open to feedback. The decor and the atmosphere is good too. It’s a nice place to visit, it would be great if they could have said they don’t have something in the menu, instead of cooking something absolutely...

As we knew that AMRIT’s clientele is quite big and the place has a lot of demand, we decided to book a table for two people. However, despite the fact that we arrived 15 minutes before our reservation was scheduled, we had to wait 40 minutes to get a table ! And that is not all, when we ask the waiter (or who seemed to be the waiters’ manager) he told us that everyone had a reservation and he could not show us where our names were written or registered on his list. Apparently, the reservation service is just a futile attempt to lure customers into the restaurant only to disappoint them with their lack of organization and unfriendly customer service.

When we finally got a table, we had to wait another 40 minutes The food was quite good (despite it was cold - perhaps it also was waiting over 40 minutes to be brought to our table).

We felt disrespected. We wouldn’t recommend this restaurant.

PS: apparently the establishment also even allows...