Restaurant review: Fiery hot flavours from South Africa find their way to a city mall

The minute we hear African, we tend to jump to conclusions that the food is bland and lacks flavour but this restaurant takes the effort to prove otherwise. As we walked into the colourful store, the first thing that caught our attention was the staff dressed in T-shirts ranging from green and red to yellow. We’ll come back to this in a bit. After an introduction of the chain and the cuisine, we got straight down to business.

If you’re a vegetarian, you might as well stop reading here and not bother trying out this place because they serve predominantly chicken — in different forms and flavours. That’s when we understood that the T-shirts stand for three levels of spice; mild, hot and extra hot. The chicken comes in varying bastings (marinade or sauce in which meat is cooked) like lemon and herb, hot and extra hot peri-pri sauce.

 

We chose a quarter portion of chicken made extra hot, two kinds of meat on skewers — lemon and herb and hot, a plate of liver fry also made hot and chicken grilled with pineapples. This was apart from the staple burgers, wraps and rice bowls one might find anywhere else. Here’s where the meal got interesting. When Galito’s means hot, they mean HOT! As reviewers, we usually have a high tolerance for spice but we were dazed for five minutes after eating our ‘extra hot’ chicken quarter… this is a good thing according to us because it has a way of clearing up the senses.

The small plates were quite filling so we would recommend two people share one main course, unless you’re Stone Cold Steve Austin appetite-wise. Be wise and order a drink, we had a fizzy lemonade, to put out the fire on your tongue in case you find the food too spicy. If you still feel like your body is burning, dig into the oh-so-delicious malva pudding with salted caramel sauce and vanilla ice cream. It was clearly one of the best desserts we’d eaten in quite a while and we strongly recommend this over the baked yoghurt with berry sauce (which they served to us without the berry sauce).

Address: Unit 214, 2nd Floor, Forum Vijaya Mall, Arcot Road, Vadapalani

Cuisine: South African

Must-have: Grilled chicken livers, Espetada, O Porto rice

Timing: 11 am to 11 pm

Star rating (on 5):***