Aarya, Deena’s Restaurant, MasterChefSA

Sunday, December 10th, 2017

Reviewed by Tamara Balla

I have visited Masterchef Season 1 Winner Deena Naidoo’s restaurant on several occasions, on request from my little lad, well not so little anymore! Generally on his birthday he requests to go there. He loves butter chicken! So finally I decided to write a review on my last visit to Arya’s. Tesh and I with our 2 children decided to take 2 friends to try Deenas famous butter chicken curry This review is based on my last visit. I myself generally order the chilli prawn salad as a starter which is a generous, portion of salad served with balsamic, garlic & chilli prawns with a mixed, crisp, fresh, leafy salad vine tomatoes, cucumber, spring onion, peppadews and soft chunky, creamy feta then with deglazed balsamic drizzle. In all my visits this dish never failed to delight me. All the textures and flavours combined are perfect. Crunchy, creamy, seasoned to perfection.. It’s refreshing, delicious, healthy ...exploding with flavours. My daughter Rika, ordered the Oak smoked salmon trout salad, being the salmon trout lover that she is, which as per the menu is napped with honey and mustard dressing on lettuce,micro herbs, peppers, cherry tomatoes and red onion (so disappointing and boring) Rika wished she ordered my chilli prawn salad. My main was Deena’s award winning butter chicken served with cumin seed, basmati rice. I normally order more cumin rice has the portion given is not in proportion to the butter chicken served. This dish however during my last visit was not made with care and did not meet its usual standards. Firstly the rice was terribly over cooked; we ordered 3 of the same mains and in all the dishes served the flavours of the curries were bland with the usual pleasant burst of flavours totally absent. The colour was the same though. We ordered also a Chocolate mud pie with a dash of Turkish delight for dessert which was acceptable, except for the fact the mud pie was hard. The free birthday cake that we usually are given on birthdays at Arya’s was handed to us frozen. At least the manager prewarned us and apologised in advance for this. So we called it the ice cream cake. We mentioned to the waiter long before that we needed a cake. The service well honestly I can’t even tell you what my waiters name. He never pay our group of 6 much attention. Mostly absent the entire night. The manager however tried his best to immediately rectify our needs and quickly get our drinks after waiting for the waiter for over 20mins, then he also got us more cumin rice (which for the first time we were charged for). The manager also asked 2 others to assist with our table when our meals finally arrived, while our waiter was still in the restaurant but not at all interested in our orders or requests. He seemed to be more interested in other tables although everyone else seemed to be coping. We ordered coffees just one latte and one expresso and it wasdelivered to us 15-20 mins later after asking about it from the manager again and slices of the frozen cake was half eaten by the kids on the table by the time the coffees arrived. The cake didn’t defrost enough by the time we exited the restaurant. VERDICT: I was so embarrassed taking my friend to this restaurant hoping to let him experience this award winning dish with delight. And let him experience something to talk about. Yet the service was outrageously bad, the mains were disappointing. And even my son won’t ask to go there again. My 2 rating is mainly because of. the manager and the chilli prawn salad who tried to save the night but unfortunately wasn’t enough. I was too embarrassed to even talk about the food at the table to my guests, but they too politely mentioned that the service was slow; a few times.