With the city caught up in cricket frenzy, the folks at Intox Kitchens have come up with an exciting bar menu to keep the mood upbeat. As the home team gears up to face the blue-clad lads from Delhi tonight, business partners Bhavna Arya and Sanjeev Verma, the force behind the brand, are ready to win over your palate with an interesting range that’s curated and created especially for match evenings. A visit to their all-new dark kitchen down Sterling Road finds us in a sprawling space with a large bustling kitchen where masked chefs were experimenting with flavours and recipes, even as platters of delectable food were being paraded out at regular intervals. We had clearly landed in the middle of the team’s tasting session, and boy was it fun fielding their offerings!
Bhavna is the culinary brains of the week-old enterprise, while Sanjeev Verma, who also spearheads the popular restobar, Black Orchid, brings to the table the business acumen and a foodie’s discerning palate. Intox Kitchens is an upgrade of Intox Icecreams that was started by Bhavna from her home in 2016. During the lockdown as she was cooking up a storm for her friends and family, she soon found a new calling as the pull-apart Monkey Bread that she had created got itself a following and she was inundated with orders. We were already fans of her boozy ice creams and the fusion ones with Indian sweets. But last week, when Sanjeev and Bhavna announced their collaboration with gorgeous custom-made pink boxes filled with smaller sections of eclectic dishes that are still the talk of the town — we realised that they had upped the game. The Black Rice with edamame qualifies as gourmet and the sweetish Soba Noodles was an outright hit. “The recipes are my own. I am constantly experimenting with flavours and ingredients. So these dishes are exclusive to Intox,” shares Bhavna. The delicate green-hued creamy veg bake with avocado and pesto had flakes of almond as garnish, and made for a perfect illustration to that thought.
However, the kitchen has moved into high gear with the cricket season and is churning out delights like juicy, Sloppy Joe sliders and quintessential sticky sesame-dotted spicy wings. Falling off the bone, the latter is an easy winner (four pieces at INR 300). The Baida Lifafa, Sanjeev’s favourite, is a stuffed roti that promises to be filling and wholesome. The Jacket Potatoes (four at INR 300) are stuffed with bacon and cream, like the other dishes it does have a veg version — however, we were already distracted with the delicious chilli cheese toast (three slices at INR 200) and the Chicken in a Ball. There are plans for pepperoni and chicken as toppings for the Monkey Bread — and we will definitely be rooting for this play!
Crossing the boundary
While we stuff our faces with the bar favourites launching this weekend, the gourmet black rice creations and the shiitake rice are part of the Intox Signatures. However, the brand also has a niche Detox menu that offers subscription meals that can be customised as per instructions from a nutritionist. You might need to save some of your appetite for next week — as they get ready to launch their Comfort menu that will offer familiar dishes, which will be closely followed by their dessert section that promises many sweet surprises.