The interiors of the restaurant Fig at Museo
How hard is it to get fish and chips wrong? One only needs to batter fish, fry it to crisp, golden perfection and serve it with chips and tartar sauce. Unfortunately, the simplest dishes are the easiest to get wrong, precisely because they are so simple. Getting that satisfying crunch on the deep-fried crust is a matter of good judgment, which only comes with experience. Neither of those things seem to have been at work in the kitchen of Fig at Museo when our order of Beer Battered Fish and Chips was being prepared, because the fish that we bit into was doughy and disappointing.
Of course, it is possible that our disappointment had something to do with the contradiction between the name of the dish and its description on the menu. A beer batter is breadier when fried, whereas a tempura batter — which was promised in the menu description — is more delicate. In any case, as we chewed on our depressingly thick-crusted fish, we asked ourselves whether the dish was worth the Rs 990 that we would pay for it. The answer is “no”.
Fig has a hard time tying together the different threads of its ambition: we’re told that the cafe is designed around the idea of creating “delectable healthy, guilt-free comfort food”. Healthy food can be tasty, but those responsible need to know what they are doing. They shouldn’t, for instance, send out a salad in which the meagre dressing pools at the bottom, instead of properly coating the ingredients. This is what happened with our Signature Green Salad. They should also understand that the lemon in the hollandaise sauce is crucial to make the eggs benedict sing with flavour, but the British Eggs Benedict we ordered tasted only of butter, with an occasional hit of extra salt from the ham.
This was the other problem with the food at Fig: except when it was oversalted — as in the mushrooms that topped the Trio Tartines — it was unsalted. Too much salt is unhealthy, but seasoning is essential to bring out the flavour of food. A good restaurant knows to strike this balance.
Fig at Museo is overpriced — Rs 540 for the Signature Green Salad — and despite its undeniably lovely setting (especially the al fresco area), is not a place we would revisit unless we hear of significant improvements in the food it serves.
Price for two: Rs 3,000
Address: Shri Ganesh Mandir Marg, DLF Phase IV, Sector 28, Gurugram