BARR - Dosa Place
Saturday, January 19, 2008 at 3:11PM A restaurant review, after a long time. This restaurant made me get back to writing reviews!
After a strong recommendation from Mitr and K, we decided to check out Dosa Place this weekend.
When San told me that it is between Kiely and San Tomas Expressway on El Camino Real in Santa Clara, I immediately reeled off possible locations.
"Either it has to be in the complex which has DiCiccos or the complex that has the Officemax and Java Coffee.. there are no other places there.. unless the Uno Pizza which became a Chinese restaurant is now an Indian restaurant?". For those women out there who are intersted in knowing San's response, it was "Just shut up and drive!"
There are two new Indian restaurants. One called Peacock in the Officemax complex and the Dosa Place, which has actually replaced Dicicco's Italian Restaurant! I have fond memories of the Italian place. When San was pregnant with Jr., she would order me to go get breadsticks from Diciccos.
Location : 2665 El Camino Real, Santa Clara, CA
Wait time : 5 minutes (reasonable crowd but the place is big and we were seated instantly).
Food wait time from order : 10 minutes for all items including Dosa
Check time : 2 minutes (Visa, Mastercard, and they take AMEX)
Average price per person : $8
Rating "I miss my mother in law!".
Service : Excellent.. Really Excellent!
Items sampled : Rava Dosa, Poori Masala, Andhra Thali, Chai.
The old Italian restaurant used to be long and the walls were painted a dark color. Now the whole place is brightly lit, and looks spacious.
The food was excellent. All the items were amazing. But there is more to this review than the food. I remember my mom telling my sister once during a function at home "You should always smile when you serve the guests food. That is when they feel like eating". If you read that and said "hey, that is just common sense", well it is not the norm in most Indian restaurants in the bay area where someone serves you because they are paid by the hour and you can pretty much tell that they don't care about your culianary experience!
Dosa Place has a lot of things going for it.
1. It is brightly lit. The place looks festive!
2. The waiters, waitresses, manager, cleaners all seem to be in the 20-30 age group. They remind you of the singapore airlines air-hostesses. Always smiling and energtic and very polite they made us feel welcome.
3. They play nice fast paced Indian instrumental music in the background.
When we asked the manager she said "this is a kind-of family owned restaurant. We started two months ago and have a branch in Fremont".
We really hope that their service doesn't decline as the crowds go up!
For a second I was sad to see Dicicco's go, but now I am happy that it has found a worthy replacement.
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BARR, Indian food, dosa place, restaurant, review
Reader Comments (4)
Ok, first off, let me tell you, the Fremont branch is nothing like the Sunnyvale one, going by your experience. At least it wasnt' when I went there with my in-laws for lunch.
First of all, it took them a long while to get over their flustered looks when we walked in. We seemed to be their only customers and they seemed unprepared for anyone that day!
Then when we ordered Mango Lassi, the guy (who seemed to be the main cook cum manager) said no, they can't serve us Mango Lassi because they exhaused all of it because they got a lot of customers the previous evening. And if he has to make it freshly for us (And this takes the cake!) he'd have to open a new can of Mango Pulp and start the blender for "just one glass"!! So my FIL said, ok, we'll have 3 glasses. So the guys says, "No, it's a BIG blender so I have to have lot more orders for me to run it"! I'd never ever heard such a reason for bad service ever.
I'm glad you posted this, because I've been wanting to talk about the Dosa Place in Fremont for a long time now! Thank you!
Funny , coz When I went to the one in Santa Clara, they took forever to get us tea.
We were just waiting for what seemed like eternity.
~AG
well one persons happy place is another persons disaster...
http://bbthots.blogspot.com/2008/02/waiter-theres-fly-in-my-jamun.html
what can I tell you!
:)
maybe we will go check this place out sometime when we are in santa clara and see how long they take to get us tea!
We visited the Fremont Branch a few times.It seemed a good place initially and we were mentally rooting for them. Till a cockroach was found floating in the Rasam. How many people had had the roach juice that day?? When we pointed it out to them, very embarrassed, surprisingly there was no apology or even an offer to refund.They just shrugged. I think success has gone to their heads and they think their low prices are enough to convince you to just ignore the complete lack of hygiene. Sorry we can't. Our kid was with us and this can cause serious sickness. By their nonchalant attitude too, they lost a loyal customer that day.