Lunch outings

I am not talking about the team lunch! I am talking about those planned-cancelled-postponed-unplanned lunch outings with office colleagues cum friends. For me it started with the CDACians wherein we visited each and every food eatery at the Phoenix Marketcity, Kurla followed by the BKC restaurants and many more. Lunch was a ritual for birthday parties, promotions, farewells and diwali. Miss my lunch group a lot. We always divided the duties: one will remind the group of the lunch, one finalizes the date, one checks the venue and menu, one is the time keeper, one is the payer, one will check the shortest route first to the venue and one is the insta enthu who will click photos of every dish served!

I am very sure that every lunch outing goes through all of these:

• We never go out for lunch on the decided date due to unforeseen issues (urgent last minute meetings, production code breakdown, etc).
• There is a whole lot of discussion on the next possible date, venue and menu, recommendations, not to bring tiffin reminder, no meetings schedule, etc.
• Once the date and venue is finalized, at what time to leave from office? In groups of two/three. It also happens that a few must go ahead and catch the table and order the starters.
• There are chances that the restaurant is full and we either have to wait or find another restaurant on the fly.
• Finally when all are in, we relish a delicious meal and have quality time. We do try new dishes which sometimes turn out to be wow and sometimes "ab order kiya hai toh khau"
• Last but not the least, there will be one urgent call from someone's manager and we are back to office in 10 minutes.

Post my lunch group left and the lockdown, I go with other groups for such lunch outings. Last I visited Kembara, BKC on 5th April alongwith Nidhi Patel, Lozika Shah, Prathmesh Khedekar and Kiran Raikar. Again this was not the venue we decided, the tables were full so this was on the fly. Here are the dishes we tried (some with chopsticks!):

Wok fried Sichuan Noodles

Crystal vegetable dumpling

Asparagus cheese spring rolls