Bastian, Worli

Bastian has been one of Bombay’s favourite restaurants for a while now. With a fun, playful tale on South East Asian flavours with a California influence, it showed Bombay a new way of eating seafood compared to classics like Gajalee. I love Chef Boo Kim, who is as talented as he is understated, always warm and generous both with his cooking and as a person. 

When Boo said they were opening a new Bastian in Worli I assumed it was a branch. Considering how successful the Bandra outlet is, it made sense to have another space closer to the business district. The restaurant opens on December 18th but I was fortunate to be invited by Boo and the team last week for a preview as I was traveling to Bombay for the day. 

I was pleasantly surprised to realise that while it may be called Bastian, the new place is a completely different restaurant. Located where Hard Rock used to be, less than half the menu is carried over from the Bandra Bastian. The flavours are much more East Asian than South East Asian with strong Japanese and Korean influences. The cooking is clean and uncluttered in typical Boo style while still retaining that remarkable ability to pack in incredible amounts of flavour. They also have a robata so the grills are excellent. In fact everything I ate was excellent, crowd pleaser after crowd pleaser. 

The Pull Me Up Cake will be the
sensation of the season 

Korean fried chicken with
melted mozzarella... big big winner 

The big big stars though are the Korean Fried Chicken and the Pull Me Up Cake. I’m a fried chicken junkie and Boo’s version is a global all star. With melted mozzarella, sesame soy glaze, sesame seeds and kimchi and scallions. 

And the Tiramisu pull me cake will be a huge Instagram favourite. A creamy, gooey marvel with coffee syrup, ganache, mascarpone mousse, coffee glaze and coffee crumbles. For some reason I felt it also had Oreo cookie crumble but I’m assured it didn’t. Wait and watch, this will be Bombay’s dessert of the season. 

I also ate:

• Al pastor pork belly robata with pineapple, onion and cilantro 
• Prawns palapa with dedicated coconut, chilli and scallion 
• 
  Lobster tail robata with miso garlic butter and lemon 
  
  
• 
  Watermelon carpaccio with beet Tigre de leche, Chiki, radish and orange 
• 
  
  Norwegian salmon with jalapeño and ponzu
• Burrata with black olive caramel, pesto, strawberries and cherry tomato. Very smart combination that reminded me of an English summer