Zaaffran

It's always fun to have friends visiting from overseas. It's time when I can bring them (i.e. I have excuse) to nice restaurants and we have more people to order more dishes to share :) However, this time I was given the task to pick a restaurant with a small challenge. 1 of them was a Malay so I had to look for halal restaurants. Lucky for me, eatability had a halal category to search on. That's how I found out that Zaaffran is a halal restaurant and it's also in the Entertainment Book. So it actually didn't take too long to decide. 
We decided to go with the 4 courses BBQ Banquet - $44.90 per person. It's got a few entrées to share, some chicken, some lamb, some beef and even dessert so pretty much got everything covered.  

Papadums and the mint sauce came not long after we placed our orders. Very crispy and not oily at all! Some places that I've been served papadums that were dripping in oil, but this didn't have a single drip of oil on them. 

This dish here was the Gol Guppas. This was something new to me. These are the crispy hollow 'pods' with a hole. What we were supposed to do was to put the filling (the little bowl in the background) into the 'pods' and then put some sauce inside. The filling was made mainly with potato - kinda like curry puff filling. 

These were the potato-corn mini patties. They were small bite size (like a 20c coin) pieces. Deep fried till crispy on the outside, but little bit chewy inside. Other than these 3 entrées, there were some garlic naans with some dips as well. Photo of the garlic naans were pretty bad, so I'm just gonna skip through them and go to the mains. 

Our first main - Chicken seekh kebab & chicken tenderloins. Both the tenderloins and the kebab were very tasty. Lots of very fragrant herbs and cooked just right. 

Mushroom naans came with our first main dish. It was my first time having mushroom naans. They were so good!! Lots and lots of mushroom inside the warm and fluffy naan. All of us liked the mushroom naans. 

By the time our 3rd course was served, we were already starting to feel full from finishing ALL the mushroom naans. Massive pieces of beef ribs were served as part of the 3rd course. These beef ribs were quite disappointing though. The piece that I had was too chewy. Definitely over cooked. However, the other piece that my friend took was cooked perfectly! Very soft and tender! Then there was another that was in between. Not as hard as mine, but not as tender as the other. So it was kinda like a lucky dip.

Our 3rd course had also these lamb cutlets and stuffed mushrooms. Lamb cutlets were really really good! Normally I don't like lamb because of the smell, but these cutlet not only they didn't have that smell, but they were marinated well, perfectly cooked, slightly charred on the outside, but so tender and juicy inside. Much better than the beef ribs. 

Another component of our 3rd course - cheese naans. By then, we could really hardly fit anything into our stomachs anymore. But look at the golden colour naan!! How could we resist that. I was cursing inside "why didn't they serve this earlier???" I could've fit the last few pieces into my stomach instead of just looked at them while the waitress took them away. I miss them already. 

Luckily our last course was just 2 scoops of kulfi/ice-cream. The green was pistachio flavoured, the red was rose flavoured. They were more like gelato than ice-cream. So didn't feel too rich and creamy which was good given the state that we were in at the end of the 3rd course. 


All of us enjoyed our dinner very much. Everything was halal which fit our main requirement. Coming from Malaysia, my friends were very surprised how well presented and different these Indian food were comparing to those in Malaysia. Gave them a totally different feel to Indian food. They even joked that the cheese naan here were made with such generous amount of cheese and if we were to get it like that in Malaysia, we might need to provide our own cheese :) 



Harbourside Shopping Centre
Level 2, Shop 345, 10 Darling Dr
Tel: 02 92118900



Our table was very dark. We had a nice table by the window looking across the harbour to cockle bay wharf. Prefect view, but just not enough lighting for good photos.