A thali is a metal plate on which Indian food is served. So basically, every plate serving Indian food is a thali! Usually thalis serve the Indian staples like rice, dal, rotis or parathas, papads (extremely thin deep-fried bread), a little salad and a teeny-tiny amount of dessert. Usually there are only one or two desserts served on a thali. Home-made Indian food is placed usually quite haphazardly on a plate. In restaurants however, thalis are more sorted. The vegetables, the dal, the rice, the dessert are served in proper bowls. Thali-exclusive restaurants in India are quite common as well.
Home-made thali Vs. Restaurant-made thali.
Usually whenever we go to a restaurant we want a little bit of everything, because hey, variety is the spice of life (pun intended)! Choices are always haunting since we always wonder about the road not taken, or in this case, the other yummy dish that we didn’t order because the other one is just as good! But, what if I told you that there exists a dish so delicious and chocolate-y and mouth-watering that you feel that you’re the happiest person alive? Yes, such an amazingly simple dish exists and it is known as the – Chocolate Thali!
You dear reader, would be thinking one of the two things right now –
“Oh my God! My mind is officially blown! How did such a dish never exist before? I must go and try it at once!”
Or,
“That’s preposterous! A thali serving chocolate dishes only? Too much chocolate!”
I completely disregard the second kind of a person because life is just too short to not try a chocolate thali. So, this thali is served at a comparatively new restaurant called ‘Desi Klub.’ Everything about this restaurant represents the modern Indian generation. We, the Indian youth are always indecisive, hell, ask the question,”Beta, college ke baad kya kar rahe ho?” (“Kid, what are you gonna do after college?”) and every kid will either want to do nothing or ten different things. All the dishes in this restaurant are named after something and Indian grandma would say, for example, grandmas always call nachos khakhra(thin spicy crackers) with cheese sauce. But what’s more important is the Chocolate Thali!
This magnificent thali consists of chocolate papad with a drizzle of white chocolate sauce, gulab jamuns (deep-fried cottage cheese balls) filled with chocolate sauce, chocolate laddoos, chocolate brownies, chocolate ice-cream, chocolate shrikhand (strained yoghurt), chocolate sauce and finally a big, white chocolate lollipop filled with raspberry sauce!
Whenever elders come to know of such a dessert, at first they’re completely sceptical of the sheer amount of sugar on the plate, but once the dish arrives, no one can escape the charm of the Chocolate Thali.
I solely went to Desi Klub to check out this platter because although this idea is extremely simplistic, nothing like this has been made before. All the starters and the mains were pretty okay, nothing really mind-blowing, but once this platter arrived, everyone at the table wanted to get a bite of each and every individual dessert present on the thali. All the dishes present on the menu are between the range of 100-300Rs., but this dessert is the most expensive dish on the menu at 350Rs, but it’s so worth the money.
Now, for the official rankings:
White chocolate lollipop – 10/10 (quite frankly, I would give it an infinity on 10)
Chocolate ice-cream – 7/10
Chocolate brownie – 8/10
Chocolate-filled gulab jamuns – 8/10
Chocolate shrikhand – 9/10
Chocolate laddoos – 7.5/10
Chocolate sauce – 8/10
Chocolate papad – 10/10 (another infinity, same as before)
Final Verdict
As if it wasn’t obvious enough already, go TRY it!
Ramexabella 