Phoenix Market City known as phoenix mall has become a landmark in Chennai as a Multiplex and shopping mall in the southern part of Chennai in Velachery.  Living close to it, it is our usual haunt for get-togethers, shopping and a day out with family and friends.  Our activities always involved Food and Phoenix Market City Chennai (PMCC) has food court and restaurants offering global Indian cuisine.  We are vegetarians and so we stick to the Vegetarian food at Rajdhani, ID and Kailash Parbat at the Food court.  Though we had seen so many restaurants tempting us to try them out for Vegetarian offering we never tried it out.  Just then we got an invitation to be a part of the Food Crawl event with Celebrity Foodie Kunal Vijayakar at Phoenix Market City.  It was a great opportunity extended to us and we would like to thank Chennai Food Guide for including us in it.  We are foodies and anything that spells food has its own connotation in our dictionary.

Normally we go for food walk but since it was within the mall, it was called Food Crawl.  We began the food crawl from Punjab Grill located in the ground floor of Phoenix mall.  Celebrity Foodie Kunal Vijayakar had a cooking session in here with the Chef Khasif and the cooked dish was chicken based – Dhaniya Mirchi da Kukkad – a Punjab Grill special. So we resorted to a vegetarian dish with potato and Naan quickly prepared by the restaurant when they came to know we were vegetarians. Thanks to the PMCC Management and Chennai Food Guide Mr. M.Mohamed Ali for ensuring we were well taken care of throughout the Food Crawl.

We were a group of food bloggers and Chennaifocus was really happy and proud to be a part of the elite food bloggers present in the event.  Jane Jeyakumar, Programming Head and Breakfast Show Presenter of Chennai Live 104.8 FM joined us with the producer Abinaya Subramaniam.  The schedule was tightly packed with Celebrity Foodie Kunal Vijayakar proceeding with the tasting session at Punjab Grill, Noodle Bar, Spaghetti Kitchen, Jonahs Bistro, Rajdhani, Mainland China and Nandos. He interacted with Chef Anish for Noodle Bar/ Spaghetti Kitchen, Chef Anand at Jonahs Bistro, Chef Hemji Maharaj at Rajdhani, and Chef Sankar Mahakud at Mainland China.

Celebrity Foodie Kunal Vijayakar At Punjab Grill

Celebrity Foodie Kunal Vijayakar At Noodle Bar

Celebrity Foodie Kunal Vijayakar At Nandos

Celebrity Foodie Kunal Vijayakar At Jonahs Bistro

Celebrity Foodie Kunal Vijayakar At Spaghetti Kitchen

Celebrity Foodie Kunal Vijayakar At Mainland China

The key event was the launch of the PMCC Food Guide By Kunal Vijayakar to be received by the beautiful Savera Hotels Managing Director Nina Reddy at Annam Café at Design Hotel, PMCC.  We have Food guides based on cities but here we had a food guide launched for the restaurants present in the mall. One can imagine the options in there if a food guide should be dedicated to it. The launch of the food guide was followed by a Q&A session by the attendees – socialites, women entrepreneurs, food writers and media,  with Kunal Vijayakar which he answered true to his heart and it had the hardcore foodie stamp written all over it.

Moving to the Food Crawl, we had interactions with the Celebrity Foodie as we crawled from one restaurant to another.  He was at his best answering us in all his sincerity and acknowledging his love for street food. We are sure we are going to see more of him in Chennai soon to try out street food and unexplored areas of our cuisine.

The biggest surprise for us was the presence of vegetarian dishes in the menu and they tasted good too. It was really surprising to see a vast number of vegetarian dishes in Mainland China which we never anticipated. In the list of restaurants we crawled, Rajdhani was the only pure vegetarian restaurant. The food crawl was a tasting session and so we had limited number of items in each restaurant.  Here is our collection from the event –