Back in May, I visited Le Café during the Mango dessert festival. Le Café is a small dessert outlet inside Novotel Hyderabad (Kothaguda). It’s an open café inside the hotel, and benefits from the quiet and relaxing ambiance of Novotel.
Although Le Café is housed inside a five star property, the prices are very reasonable, with one exception, which I’ll come to later in the review. Since, I was there specifically for the Mango desserts, I only ordered the ones with mango in it. The normal menu will be different, but I’m hoping that the quality of the desserts I tasted will be reflective of the quality of the food in general. I wanted to try a few of the quick eats, unfortunately pretty much everything I asked for was unavailable.
I ordered a couple of mango truffles and mango cupcakes to start off with. The truffles were Rs. 25 each, while the cupcake was priced at Rs. 40. I enjoyed the cupcake, but found that the chocolate flavour in the truffle completely overpowered the mango. Next up was a Dacquoise with Mango Bavarois & Coconut Jelly on Almond. This is priced at Rs. 100 and was both a visual delight and a treat for the tongue. I finished off with the Mango Almond tart priced at Rs. 150. The fresh juicy mangoes were a perfect pairing for the tart, and I devoured this dessert with glee.
As I mentioned earlier, everything at Le Café was extremely reasonably priced, with a singular exception. And that exception is water. This is a pet peeve of mine with most five star properties. While most of the desserts that I tried were priced at or below hundred bucks, a simple twenty rupees bottle of water was priced at Rs. 90! There’s absolutely no excuse for this. Even more so, since they don’t even offer regular water as an option. So your options were either to go thirsty or to pony up almost a hundred bucks for a bottle of water. I thoroughly enjoyed the desserts at Le Café, but this did leave behind a sour taste.
