In this very blessed month of Ramadan, Muslims around the world tend to fast the whole month. Having food throughout the day to no food or water for the day, this transition may seem difficult and a huge burden for many people out there who never kept one. Truth be told, they couldn’t be further away from the truth. This month teaches humility, struggle, bonding, and more noble qualities that most have forgotten due to all the luxuries of life. Fasting is but a supercharger of body and mind, a detoxifier, if you can do it, you get the benefit of having a pure and stable mind.
That being said, I wanted to share an experience I’ve had just yesterday. I had the pleasure of going to one of the fine dinings in the state!
My parents and brother have been planning to pay a visit to this place since the beginning of the month. And after 20 days, we finally got to this place.
Location: Lé Meridian.
Entry Cost: $30
Type: Buffet.
The best part of this adventure was I had enough charge on my iPhone 7 to capture all this amazing food on my phone.
Before we get into the post, I wanted to mention one more important lesson that I’ve picked up during all my years of going to buffets.
- That is, never go for rice or oily food or food with high carb amounts. It kills your appetite and would easily satiate your will to eat.
- During the time of Ramadan, when you get to eat after the whole day of fasting, you wouldn’t want to eat much anyway. The size of your stomach would decrease, so a little amount of food could easily fill you up. To prevent that, all I had to do was eat as slowly as possible.
We’ve seen many times that eating too fast after a day of not eating can give someone a bad stomach and may trigger retching and vomiting.
To prevent this, I ate as slowly as possible. Chew the food until it is completely broken down and give your jaws some rest, simultaneously🙃. Increasing the length of eating would increase food digestion and absorption and assimilation throughout the body.
Now that that’s out of the way, the fine dining experience begins.
Iftaar was at 6:23 pm, we had to reach the place by 5:40 pm. Being a traditional Asian, we set out at 5:40 pm. We were severely delayed because we were waiting for our Uber. The guy was on the other side of town and kept messaging “coming”. So, we called him up and asked him to cancel the ride and got our car out of the garage.
My dad don’t want to drive all the way there but in the end, he had to😅.
The sun was almost gone, whatever was left of it was pure bliss.
Ps. If you guys didn’t know, Bangladesh is having severe heat due to the Sun, reaching 41.2 Celsius. That’s a record and it was the highest temperature we’ve seen in 7 years.
We reached the place by 6 and hopped onto our seats by 6:10 pm. People were gathering food already. I decided to wait a bit, and let the commotion die down while I would take a nice rest and look out the window. There were still some cars on the road, each of them desperately trying to make it to their homes for iftar.
Moments before the big feast I decided to make my move. People had already settled down and the chefs were refilling all the dishes, this way I got the hot food😁.
The first thing I grabbed was the tangy pasta. Tomato with some other ingredients made it good. As a topping I went with what I thought was cheese, it was ginger😅😒. That made my mouth shudder with distaste but I made an effort to not show it. Then, I grabbed some spicy chicken, lamb shank, flaky fish that was taken from a big White Snapper, lobster, some seafood, and chicken dishes. I forgot some names but boy was they all tasty. Except for the dough-covered chicken dish you can see just behind the pasta on the left side from the center. Bread should've been avoided. I didn't take rice so I'll call it a good judgment at the time.
I took a good 30 minutes eating it, chewing as slowly as possible, and giving my stomach to digest.
An upper view of my palate. THE BEST PART was the beef steak you see from the left side of the picture. The juices can be seen from here. The yummy fat joined with this beef portion was insane. I like fat but there are many people out there who detest this because of the smell. This was way too good, I brought some chili sauce and a side of mayo right after having one of the steaks. I didn't get the sauce that you wanna have with steaks because I couldn't find it🙃.
For the next round, I got another batch of pasta, I am a sucker for noodle's kind, a little rice just to taste(my Asian ancestors commanded in my mind), some more flaky fish, and prawn tempura.
Not my palate, my mom's. #Notamonster. She suggested I to stay away from the chicken that's located at the center of the pic. The chili chicken was indeed not that good.
The third round. Starting from the bottom, there's a little pasta, on the left I brought some more beef steak portions, I brought a little amount of biriyani rice that had some beef, and above it was another type of chicken that was found from the further end of the place. Then I got some fried fish, flaky fish again, lamb shank again, then I had that spicy chicken that I was told not to have😂😅. Behind the pasta on the right was a fried chicken. At the center of it, all was a lobster type of thing encased with pastry.
From it all, the second best thing I had was the lamb shank. I've had this before in Westin and InterContinental but none of the places had this amazing lamb shank. The seafood was good but it was fried. Fried food must be avoided by everyone, always. Not good on the stomach i.e health. I wasn't going for that Spicy chicken anytime soon. The flaky fish had a little stink of fish I didn't realize until this time. Then I figured that this piece was taken off from the part closest to its bone, hence the stench. By this time, I'd had enough pasta and didn't like the tanginess anymore.
My parents had already moved onto the dessert section. A slice of pistaccio cake, a slice of dark chocolate cake, a slice of white cake that was literally encased with cream, the orange and yellow twisty thing called 'Jilapi' wasn't up to the mark. The, we have a very thin slice of another chocolate cake that ran out because it was too good and underneath it was a pie. The pie was nasy, mostly because I don't like pies.
The cup of nuts, yellow rice and red sweet is something very traditional here in Bangladesh. This dish has a long history, ranging from the Reign of Akbar! They got this right thankfully.
Then, we got Roshmalai in one cup that was terrible, and a different kind of sweet that I didn't like in the cup besides Roshmalai.
As I reached my end of stomach space, I went for my 4th and final round of main course. One regret, I didn't see the Sushin until the end of my course.
Brought three of them, one had a little chili pepper on top going on, another had a fish egg with fish and a white yogurt sort of viscous thing, and the red one had prawn as a topping. And, a little wasabi between the red and orange sushi.
This got me perplexed, Westin and Amari had a more diverse collection of Sushi and sashimi.
I brought another portion of lamb shank, some spicy mutton, beef steak that was generously refilled by the chefs behind the counter and had an amazing gravy-like sauce on top of it, and flaky fish.
This batch was undoubtedly the best stuff I've brought back. At the center of the plate was the chili and mayo combination that gave great support to the steak and fish. Just to clarify, I have never used such sauce with Sushi and would never disrespect this tradition.
Because I'm a foodie, I like to combine sauces, #saucefreak.
I took a little more rest as we were nearing the end of our escapade, I brought a slice of croissantm pepperoni, and meat that I didn't know. I also brought some blue cheese and normal cheese, and a roasted chocolate bread. Blue cheese is good for your health if you didn't know.
This was brought in for my parent. I got some more servings of steak, some salad sushi, blue cheese, hummus, yogurt, beef slices and some rice. They insisted on the rice again, don't know how this would work for them.
Night strolled in, and after non-stop eating for an hour and a half it was time for a little rest before approaching the dessert.
It was almost 7:40 pm and my stomach had a little space for it. I found breadpudding underneath a closed container. And honestly, this was the best desert after the pistaccio cake. I didn't heed my parents' warning about the roshmalai, had it and it was disgusting. The white creme cake was not bad, and the chocolate cake was astounding. The silver thing on top was chocolate covered in sliver.
My mom wanted a sushi from the waiter, the guy was impressed with us and gave us a whole roll with chopsticks topped with mustard. This desecration was made by them, not me.
Lastly, I had very little space left on me but i had to get my money's worth of food in me, so I went for the last food in the place, ice cream.
They had 4 options: Margo sorbet, saffron, vanilla, and strawberry.
I didn't risk it with Saffron, and mango sorbet. Although, overtime, the strawberry ice cream looked more and more distasteful. The vanilla was the only thing that helped my mouth stay in shape. Regardless, the vanilla made it all work.
After all, this was over I realized that I didn't take the pictures of the yummy juices they had here. There was a date juice that looked like cough syrup. The bad part of it was, it tasted like it had more amount of water than the date.
There was a mixed fruit punch that would've been bad for me if I had taken it, the mix of all the seafood and fruits wouldn't sit well.
There was a salted lassi that tasted like yogurt but it was better and went well with the food in my stomach. This also reduced the water craving I was having.
There was a minty basil leaf. This was some masala on it, some green chili, and mints. How did I know> My mother's colleague had made this dish a few days back and both taste the same, meaning they were good.
There was rose water that didn't taste good. Surprisingly, this juice ran out more frequently. I didn't complain because I had what I wanted and it wasn't running out that frequently.
Thank you guys for reading so far and do let me know about your escapades.