Malabar — Restaurant in Zurich

The review is for the cooking course the restaurant offers.

I was coming in with very high expectations, and was unfortunately very disappointed. First of all, the communication and everything before the course was in English, while on the actual day, the expectation is that everything is in (Swiss) German - the owner was nice enough to at least speak High German and/or a little bit of English, but I would definitely like to be warned about this beforehand. Then, you personally do basically none of the cooking as the attendee - some of the folks were able to mix, but all chopping, measuring, ... was done by the owner, hence basically no hands-on experience. Furthermore, the course is really spread out, there were maybe 2 hours out of the 7 we spent there where we were just sitting and waiting around for something to happen. I was also surprised that we were basically kept hungry from 10am to 5pm apart from a tiny bit of sampling samosas at the very beginning, and a bite of naan in the middle; I really didn't expect that I'd need to bring my own lunch to a full day of cooking course. And to top it off, the food that we had in the end was oversalted to the point that I only enjoyed it because I was practically starving by the time we got to eat it.

If I paid maybe CHF 80 for this experience, I would maybe be able to handle it better. But CHF 140 were definitely way, way too much for what...

I’m very sorry. But it wasn’t worth it whatsoever. Prices are way to high for what they serve.

The naan is made by hand in house so they say. Nice thing for sure but half of the naan is burnt and dry and not soft like naan.

The vegetarian thali had a nice saag paneer dish in the middle. Everything else surrounding didn’t really taste that good. See photo with food in the silver platter.

The highlight was the chicken dish supposedly a family recipe. For the low low price of almost 40 CHF all you get is an empty plate and a tiny bowl with chicken and sauce. That is an absolute rip off. 2 small water, one mango lassi, 2 garlic naan and the dishes ran us over 100 CHF. I mean what gives? Then I get asked if I want rice to that poor poor tiny bowl of chicken and the rice and that was charged with 5 CHF.

While the Ambiente was nice and staff was friendly. They also took over 30 minutes to serve our order. They are super slow. That and the truly mediocre taste and frankly poor plating when it comes to the chicken is just too much. Won’t go there again. And I find the prices are way to high for...

The team on staff were very open, friendly and respectful. They graciously provided recommendations and explained the food accompaniments when the food arrived. The shared appetiser was so delicious (particularly the pieces with the tamarind sauce and the avocado/mango salad) that I would order this again and again! We also ordered a lamb Thalia to share and between the two of us plus a garlic naan and a serving of sour cream ice cream, we were barely able to leave the restaurant! I would have been tempted by the Kardamom creme brulee on the specials menu but could not fit a single bite more. I was impressed with the staff, the food and the warm ambiance both inside and on the approach from outside. I would definitely recommend a visit to this restaurant and am already planning my next visit. Oh, and the house cocktail was also refreshing, delicious and...