HOTEL SARAVANA BHAVAN — Restaurant in Zone 5 Royapuram

Saravana bhavan is known for their scrumptious south indian food. I ordered a quick lunch and the whole situation was ironic. I placed the order via swiggy at 1:30. I received the order at 2:50. Two factors. Swiggy took it's own sweet time to assign a delivery partner. And the restaurant ran out of curd rice I was told. I contacted the number provided in the swiggy app and the person on the call informed me that it was the delivery boys number and to contact the actual restaurant. By 2:30 I got impatient and contacted the swiggy partner and asked to speak to the restaurant representative. The man who spoke was very crass. I asked him when they would hand over the order to which he responded rather annoyed that food is still being prepared as they ran out of curd rice. If I wanted a replacement with some other rice I should have asked for it. I asked him if they were preparing the said curd rice for over an hour and if I was contacted regarding the delay regarding the replacement and his response was you cancel the meal. What a joke! Safe to say I would not recommend Saravana bhavan to anyone. . . . So I set out to try their most basic dosa. The packaging was good. I've never come across a restaurant serving dosa in this packaging. It was served with two types of chutney, red and green, and sambar. The red chutney was good but the green chutney was salty. The sambar could have been better. The dosa itself tasted good. Their filter coffee comes in a cup with a lid packaging. It was good. But not worth the price. Over priced food with normal taste, saravana bhavan is thriving on just their brand name I suppose. Packaging: 5/5 Taste:3/5 Value...

When we order sambar vada, we usually get vada soaked in sambar for atleast 30 minutes.

In genuine restaurants, when sambar vada isn't available, they simply say so, to maintain the name of quality. In others where money is more important than quality and name of the restaurant, the server gets a vada poured with sambar just now. Hotel Saravana Bhavan falls in the later category.

I didn't expect this from Hotel Saravana Bhavan. See for yourself in the attached pictures. First picture may not reveal much of the actual size of the vada. Second picture is the bill with the vada. Third picture is where we can clearly see that the vada wasn't soaked for enough time.

When ordered the tea, I was asked if I prefer tea with sugar or without sugar. I requested tea with "nattu sakkarai", an organic jaggery that is famous in most places in TN. But, the person who took the order sarcastically laughed at me saying why people go back to old ways of drinking tea?!

Later on the same day, I had to take lunch on the same restaurant, thinking that it could be a one-off incident and I was in a hurry to get back home via Egmore railway station. For INR125, the quality of lunch isn't...

Great food, but I somehow feel they have got their Math wrong. There's a lot of publicity being made by this restaurant chain regarding their 'Quick Lunch' and other newly introduced budget food. I'm one of their regulars when it comes to South Indian food. Out of curiosity I ordered a Quick Lunch take away today. Thankfully it's the same great quality & taste.

But what surprised me was the quantity 🤔 of food. There were hardly few spoonfuls of Sambar rice, Lemon rice and some curd rice. There was a small sachet containing lemon pickle and also a mini container having some green chutney. The regular potato chips were missing (usually provided with sambar rice). I feel a person with good appetite would need at least three times that quantity. Me being a sparse eater too, didn't find it sufficient 😑 I was charged ₹55 for the food & ₹15 packing charge (almost 30%) . Well, I guess it's difficult to be pocket friendly and maintain quality (and quantity, in this case) at the same time!

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