Comic Relief - Leaping Windows Cafe (Near Indiranagar Club, Bangalore)

If you manage to find it (Google maps included), I’d say pat yourself on the back. If it makes it any easier – Leaping Windows Cafe is on the road parallel to Indiranagar club (Ask the fruit vendor at the end of the road). Like all things Indiranagar, this is an old bungalow converted into a café. What it also uniquely is, is a comic book library to read your Tintins, Asterix and Calvin and Hobbes in peace. Of course, you pay 40 bucks an hour, but that’s small change. You walk past the reading den on the ground floor to the 1st Floor which has multiple seating options, all of which have bold comic paintings hanging on the whitewashed walls. We choose to sit outside as it was cool and it faces a canopy of trees, which always is a plus point for me. I plonk myself on the low cane chair/ settee and proceed to look at the menu. Standard breakfast options coupled with a section for Burgers/ pastas/ salads/ mains and quick bites (available post noon). A whole page dedicated to coffee and its variants including an exciting sounding Aztec coffee blended with vanilla ice cream. (Didn’t really try that because I’m not a java lover!).

I ordered the Masala Chai, the friend got a Chickoo Smoothie and I slipped lower into the sette and let the fan breeze lull me to a dull haze. The Masala chai arrived in a pretty striped mug and was bang on with flavours of cinnamon, cardamom and ginger. I could have easily had a couple of these that afternoon if I wasn’t ravenously hungry. The Chickoo smoothie was a bit of a confused candidate. I think it gave up halfway between a juice and a smoothie and settled into drink purgatory. Just a little bit more chickoo along with some yoghurt could have added the necessary bulk to give it the right mouth feel.

The order of Jalepeno and Corn Omelette arrived quickly and presented a pretty picture. The friend thought one slice of bread that accompanied it was bordering on being miserly, but I bought out the low-carb theory and that seemed to have quietened him down. Anyway, the omelette itself is made of three eggs and you end up feeling satiated without the extra slice of bread. 

I ordered the French Toast with Pesto and Sausages, after a recent entry on Ruth’s blog. I tried to order something else, but pesto always hold a strange charm that I find hard to resist. It was great. The savory French toast was made with thick, soft slices of bread generously coated with pesto and grilled to a golden (green) brown. They cut up the sausage into diagonal fingers and placed them over the toast. No big shakes, but it made me happy. (This was a standard Venky’s / some generic brand chicken sausage – so don’t go expecting a world of fascinating flavors). 

We took our time to eat this, mainly because our agenda for the day was to bitch our lives out. It helped that the staff didn’t care how long we sat there. So if you want to lounge around without being pestered to move/ order something – this is the place to be. Come 12:30 PM, we realized the rest of the menu apart from breakfast was up for grabs. A Classic Bruschetta and an Orange Glazed Chicken Salad was our way to stave off the calorific overload that was the week past – but maybe we needed to have read the menu with more care.

 

The Classic Bruschetta was a calorie bomb – thick slices of toasted bread, slathered with cooked tomato and garlic paste topped with a mound of cheese that melted all over itself and its neighbor. Now, in most situations I would be thrilled to find something like this (it tasted fantastic), but the dichotomy of the ‘classic’ bruschetta with what was presented haunted me a bit. Then there was the Orange Glazed Chicken Salad. This was healthier that the bruschetta but again didn’t live up to expectations. ‘Orange Marmalade dressing with smoked tomatoes, croutons, and crispy garlic and Parmesan shavings’. For starters, the chicken was overcooked and dry and the orange marmalade was more of a passing fancy than an actual glaze. Secondly, I wish they had tasted one of the orange segments before putting them in, because they were on their way to that unpalatable overripe, rotten stage. The salad leaves were crisp and the Parmesan shavings more than generous, but that didn’t compensate for messing up the prime ingredients. 

Even after the fail of the salad, I would still recommend the place. The service was quick, unobtrusive and friendly. The ambiance just perfect if you need to read a book and lounge around and the masala chai, just the upper you need on a down day. Stay away from the exotic sounding stuff, order the staples and don’t get carried away by the menu descriptions. If you follow these instructions, you might just come away feeling relaxed. I left four hours after strolling into the place on a Saturday morning … counts for something right? 

LEAPING WINDOWS CAFE

509, 3^rd Cross, 9^th Main,

2^nd Stage, HAL,

Indiranagar,

Bangalore.

Ph: +91 80 61344767

Parking: In the bylanes

Cost: Rs.800/- for a meal for two