Pepper Town — Restaurant in Bidhannagar

Below average food highly seasoned with bad attitude and poor service made my visit a nightmare! I had my birthday on 22nd Feb and so thought of visiting with a group of 12 for dinner. I made sure to inform them beforehand that I'll be visiting with 12 people, and they were fine with attending 12 guests. I'll start with the food first. I ordered the following - • Crispy Chicken- For ₹249 a plate quantity was extremely less and it tasted mediocre. • Schezwan Chilli Paneer- I was so shocked that a Chinese appetizer was seasoned heavily with oregano. It tasted so peculiar because of the strong smell of oregano and disgusted my guests. • Chicken 65- Portion was good, taste was very average, it was filled with large portions of bell pepper which tasted bland. Only Chicken pieces were decent. • Paneer Sandwich - So bad! Bland, dry, had no cheese and very little bit of mayo. • Chilli Chicken Pizza - From the reviews, I learnt that this was their best dish, but I was so wrong! Pizza looked nothing like the pictures uploaded by other customers, maybe they have changed their recipe. It was priced at 299/- but looked and tasted so cheap. In the name of thin crust, the crust was inexistent! Pizza was of 7 inches, while I expected a large pizza! portion size was so so small!

Now speaking of the service, there are numerous incidents I want to highlight, here are few - • Waiters were all ignorant, I had to call them 3-4 times each to ask for water, or how much time they need to serve etc. • There was a waitress who had the nerve to talk back and show anger! She was serving us with packeged water, so I asked her to serve regular water for 12 people. She made faces and taunted me saying "Uff regular water for 12!". Then she just got us one single bottle of regular water and kept it on the table. She even kept a pile of 12 plates on the table and didn't even bother to ask if the plates needed to be served. • Service was extremely slow although there were literally very few guests. There was a waiting time of approx 1 hr after each order. • My last order was of 4 pizzas, I asked them to serve 3 of them and pack 1. I waited for over 1.5 hr for the pizzas to be served. This time I totally lost my calm, after asking them for 3 times about the delay. So, I went straight to their counter and asked that particular waitress about the reason of this excess delay. To my surprise, she was so arrogant that she replied saying order of 3 pizzas is a very long order and it needs a lot of time and made it sound like it was my mistake that I ordered 3 pizzas together for the table. My only answer was that if they knew it was going to take more than one hour or if they are incompetent to serve a bigger crowd they could've informed earlier and I wouldn't have visited them, in the first place! • None of the waiters or attendees came to apologize, or even attend to my queries, they didn't even come to provide us with basic ketchup, oregano, chilli flakes etc. on their own, we had to ask several times for all that. • They were busy attending some important guest who came much later than us and made us wait forever. • In the end we asked them to clear the table so that we could get some pictures. A waiter came and took only half of the plates. He didn't bother to come back to take the rest of the plates.

Ps- all my guests were highly offended, I was extremely ashamed to have hosted my birthday dinner in this...

We have been planning to visit this place for some time. This place is near Salt Lake. The ambience is pretty decent and eye soothing. The restaurant is decorated with artificial plants. (Refer photo). It is good to note that there is no physical menu card and you have to scan in order to see the menu. There can be a debate over this since not all will fully prefer the "Digital" menu. I personally like ordering food from the physical one.

Let's proceed to the things we ordered.

Chicken Cigars with Mexican Salsa - This was something new that we had not tried earlier. Since our thirst for trying out new food is unquenchable we quickly ordered this without delaying. But there was significant amount of delay in delivering the food from the staff. 😆 It was not bothering us since I was having good relaxing time. Anyways coming to the taste.

This dish is more like Spring roll but the filling was having a continental touch. The Salsa was served in shot glasses with the rolls on top. The decoration was quite fancy and they did not disappoint in taste either. The dish was overall having the right balance and I enjoyed it. Rating - 5/5

Litchi Lemonade - My partner in crime ordered this and thankfully this was really refreshing. Rating - 5/5

Chicken Cordon Bleu - We took this dish as an appetizer by mistake from the description in the menu. But this is a main course. This was again a continental dish. The chicken is processed chicken which is wrapped in blue cheese. This is crumbed and deep fried. The garlic flavour of the sauce served with this is on the higher side. Also a hefty amount of mashed potato was served as a sidekick. The dish was overall good. Rating - 4/5

Banana Split - The worst dessert I had so far. 😂 From the photos it would seem very eye catchy but beware! Stay away from this one. Traditional banana split is different. This one was served in a sizzling plate with 2 bananas and 3 scoops of vanilla ice cream and mint on top. Cherry was supposed to be present but it was not there. Cherries were served in a seperate plate on enquiring. Since the plate was sizzling hot, the ice cream melted within a minute. The whole dessert then tasted funny. We had to discard most of the dessert. Rating - 0/5

Ginger twist - We took another mocktail since it was hot outside and the previous one was good. Also had to fix my taste buds from the last experience with the dessert. This one was also good but a bit less amount of ginger would have made this perfect. Rating - 4/5

Overall food experience - 3.5/5 The rating went down only due to the dessert. Other desserts might be good or might not be. You do try out and let me know 😄 You can definitely visit this place and try out...

Ambience is good, food is average, but there's major scope for improvement in training/hiring of staff.

Firstly, we were made to wait for more than 30 minutes to be seated, although we could see there were 2 empty tables in the restaurant which remained empty throughout (we were the last guests to leave).

Secondly, just after being seated, a waitress who was probably the head waitress (or so she thought herself to be), came over and asked us if we had a discounted booking through zomato or swiggy. Her attitude and expression changed as soon as we said yes (if you have so much problem serving guests who have a discount coupon, why tie with up swiggy or zomato in the first place?). She interrupted me twice while I was placing the ordering, blabbering about her bad experience of dealing with customers who had discount coupons.

While placing the order, she told us that seafood was excluded from the deal. I told her that was not written anywhere in the deal booking page, and I had even called the restaurant prior to my booking, when the owner had confirmed that all items except mutton and packaged beverages are included in the deal. She tried to argue by showing us the T&C of the swiggy dineout coupon, although we had booked through Zomato carnival. When I asked her to show me this rule on zomato's booking page, she said it was Zomato's fault that it was not showing (lol, what?). I wasn't ready to have any of it and asked to speak to the owner. Then she went into a corner, pretended to talk on the phone for 15 mins, and then came back and said they were making an "exception" for us. Yet, she told us that our order would take at least 1 hour (just a baked fish). And even after that, the baked fish turned out to be completely burnt and overcooked.

Next, when we tried ordering shakes and mocktails, she said those weren't available as they had "run out of ice." Yet, we could see that all other tables were getting ice with their drinks. Even the cola that was served to us had plenty of ice (photo uploaded for reference).

I really don't know what her problem is, she behaves as if she owns the restaurant and the cost for the items are being charged from her pocket. But I would highly advise the management to properly train or replace this lady, as paying customers are not going to put up with this kind of behaviour.

Other than this woman, the rest of the staff was...