Food Review - Starbucks, Orion Mall

Starbucks is in Bangalore, yes. We’ve all hear lots of hype about it and it’s something of an attraction for now with queues of coffee thirsty zombies lining up outside their stores almost every day.

The café with the largest number of stores in the world has 3 in Bangalore for now and we visited the one at Orion Mall. The place itself is not huge, they have seating for about 50 people or so. There is a glass display cum billing counter where a lot of their food items invite you to pick one of them. There is bound to be a queue for billing and to get a table on weekends, though on the other days it might be better.

The ambiance is great, plus leather chairs and large tables lend a very British feel, certainly perceived as a high end café. The rates are high too, 5 coffee’s and a muffin costed above Rs. 1000 even though the portions are very large.

We were stuffed after our meal so didn’t get a chance to eat anything, but we tried the blueberry muffin which was ok. It had a few blueberries inside but was a tad dry for our liking. The coffee we had were flavoured latte – all 3 varients, namely caramel, hazelnut and vanilla. The caramel latte was by far the best, and the other two had very mild flavours. Cappucino was pretty ordinary with a lot of froth on top.

They have optional powdered flavours which can be added, these are kept in bottles by the sugar and straws, and are not chargeable. I remember seeing cinnamon, nut meg, vanilla and one other flavor, probably hazelnut or chocolate.

They have a large range of selection of about a dozen hot coffees and atleast 5-6 cold coffees apart from some hot and cold tea variants.

Service is quick and when your items are ready, they call out your name to pick up the order. There is a personal touch with the service staff asking your experience while you have your coffee here and addressing you by your name each time, even as you leave the café.

Probably on the next visit, we’ll be sampling some of their food to judge better, so it warrants another visit for now.

Rating – 3.5/5