Couchyn at The Grand is a restaurant on Grand Hotel, MG Road Ernakulam in Kochi. It is a preferred destination for several old timers in the city as it is attached to one of the oldest & famous family restaurants in Cochin. A perfect place for wining and dining, drop into enjoy your favorite beverages, cocktails & mocktails. Recommended food pairings are their Trivandrum style chicken, fish fingers, tandoori chicken and French fries.
Blue Rock Resto Bar at Olive Downtown – very cool and awesome location at Kadavanthara. They mix fine dining dishes with fast food and snacks. They have happy hours and offers as well. A tad more expensive than Couchyn. Best pro is that you can get burgers & pizza from the hotel’s cafe downstairs to pair with your beer while you sit in the bar. Recommended is the crispy fried prawns, pork chops & their pizzas.
The Ava Lounge & Bar is hotel Raddison Blu’s bar which is on the 6th floor. Comfy chairs and Couches, thoughtful and polite staff, variety of beer, wine and liquor with a great ambience & service. Decent prices for 5 star hotel however you must go during their happy hours from 11am-4pm. Afghani chicken, tempura prawns and French fries are the only food I have tried from there and I highly recommend them. It tends to get crowded during the evenings and on weekends.
Every 2-3 months I check out fast food restaurant chains like McDonald’s, Taco Bell, KFC & Burger King (which are the big four chains that I have access to here in Kochi, India) to see what new or seasonal items they have in their menu. It’s always fun to have your favourite items from these big guns but it’s even more fun when they launch a new one. Perusing through the BK India site, I noticed that they had a couple of new ones and so I tried out one of them – the Indie Tikki Chicken Burger.
Ah yes, another one from Lays. This was one that eluded me for the longest time. For one, they only seem to be available in these Rs. 10 pack. Which is crazy for chips that you buy at home – I mean who the heck only buys the small pack? Turns out that this is not yet a full fledged flavour that Lays India is adding to their arsenal and hence they test it out for marketplace reviews and customer buying reports for a couple of years before decided that yes this belongs to the regular list. Once I found that out I thought I should now try it out.
Significance of Vishu
Renowned Malayalam film and stage actor KPAC Lalitha died at the age of 74 on Tuesday at a hospital in Kerala’s Kochi. In a career spanning five decades, she starred in over 550 films in Malayalam and Tamil. She won two National Film Awards for Best Supporting Actress along with four Kerala State Film Awards. She got the national award for the character in ‘Amaram’ in 1999 and for ‘Shantham’ in 2000. She also held the position of the Chairperson of Kerala Sangeetha Nataka Academy for five years.
Having watched a lot of laptop and phone unboxings over the years, but I have noticed that the price difference in Western nations as compared to countries like mine, which is firmly in the developing nations bracket. If you want to see examples I use the one below which is that after doing a quick Google search and using IT professionals as an example. I fall in one section of an IT professional (it’s weird but go with it) and I get a very good salary for someone in this city and state. Not the highest but in the upper levels (though I need more, just like anyone who has a lower or higher salary will always want more). Yet I can’t afford the flagship phones unless I have a bunch of savings to back it up.
Indian singer and music composer Lata Mangeshkar has died at the age of 92. She was widely considered as one of the greatest and most influential singers in India. Her contribution to Indian music industry in a career spanning seven decades has gained her honorific titles such as the Nightingale of India and Queen of Melody. Ms Mangeshkar was taken to the intensive care unit on Tuesday after testing positive for COVID-19. Lata Mangeshkar, a recipient of the Bharat Ratna, Padma Vibhushan, Padma Bhushan and Dadasaheb Phalke Awards, was an icon of Indian cinema, having sung playback for an extensive list of Hindi films; she also sang in several regional languages including Marathi and Bengali. Ms Mangeshkar, who belonged to a prominent musical family, also composed music as well as produced a handful of films.