The Asian Box, Koregaon Park, Pune, India

Restaurant Name: The Asian Box
Location: A2, Shahinsha Building, Lane 6, Koregaon Park, Pune
Buzz: +91 9766457600
Contact Person(s): Priya Mahtani / Dheeraj Mahtani

FOOD VIEW

Asian Street Food Magic

The Asian Box opened its doors to Pune with its focus being on Asian street and comfort food. They have very thoughtfully designed the menu to serve number of most popular dishes from 8 countries – Thailand, Indonesia, Burma, Japan, China, Singapore, Malaysia and India.

The owners of The Asian Box, Priya and Dheeraj Mahtani, keep striving to bring new culinary options, procure ingredients from across the continent and try to serve the very best in Asian Cuisine. In continuation of this vision they are about to introduce new dishes as part of the special menu, they have also focused on making this menu more health focused, steam and grilled meats, vegan desserts and right ingredients to suit diet conscious people, they do not serve Basa fish here.

They have been experimenting and tweaking dishes and  with numerous trials and feedback you are going to see below dishes in their best avatar.

Shitake Tofu Dimsum – Nice soft dimsum having enough filling with mild flavors letting the shitake taste prominence and making you try the various dips and soy along with these.
Vietnamese Rolls – Very refreshing simple dish that would be eaten in seconds on a hot summer day. Cucumber, carrot, mushrooms, scallion and noodles wrapped rice paper. You won’t stop at one for sure, we repeated these number of times.

Lemongrass Galangal Steamed Fish – A minimal and simplistic preparation, goodness of steamed moist fish with sublime yet effective flavors of galangal and lemongrass. This is food for soul, guilt free and yummy. They choose the fish based upon the fresh availability tilapia being the preferred one, though as it was not available fresh on particular day they used Singara but they have made it a point not to use Basa.
Thai Chilly Basil Grilled Fish – This is for the ones who like spicier food, fish is still healthy as its grilled and flavors are really mouthful with right mix of spices.
Ginger Chicken – Another starter that we loved, perfect balance of lemon and ginger nothing overpowering but together creating magic in unison. With dashes of green chilly this was a perfect blend of flavors.
Korean Rice Bowl – One portion meal based preparation, a bed of rice topped with a layer of sweet sour Korean style chicken with sesame. Liked the chicken the rice though needed more seasoning, the owners agreed to it and they will be serving buttered rice instead of plain steam rice, that we think will complete the preparation.
Pineapple Fried Rice – A sweet sour Thai preparation served in a pineapple boat. It had chunks of pineapple, fried cashews, chicken and veggies. A tangy after taste was really nice to have. This can be eaten on its own and doesn’t require any side dish as such.
Singapore Chilly Prawns – This was the showstopper dish for the day. A perfect sea food flavor curry with egg drops and fresh prawns in it. This is as good Singapore’s pride curry as you’ll get in Pune, I have tried it at most prominent places and this ranks right up there with them. A must try.
Moving ahead from all these new recipes in pipeline we were served 2 desserts – Apple Pie and Chocolate Tart.  Both desserts were Vegan which was not explicitly evident until mentioned, the ice cream on the side made up for missing milk fat . Both preparations were very good, opt for eating them warm that will add extra dimension to them. Both desserts were fresh and band on in terms of preparation.
The Asian Box with its new preparations is going to keep the flag flying high for Asian Street Food in Pune.

The Asian Box, Koregaon Park, Pune, India | Food Prowl – The Hunger Stories