Saturday, January 23, 2010

Indian Food Festival

One of the major supermarkets out here , "LuLu's" (owned by EMKE Group - one of my customers!), is having an Indian food festival at the moment. Purely by virtue of the fact that they sell Kingsmill bread from home (local bread is yuk), we shop at LuLu's regularly. The parking is a pain though. The supermarket is part of a mall which has a multi storey car park. It kind of has 3 levels per storey with steps down between the levels. This means that if you have a shopping trolley you can't take it down the steps to the next level, you can only keep it on the first level. So parking spaces on this first level are the premium spots if you want to go to the supermarket. The most annoying thing though is that for some unknown reason (answers on a postcard to me), they keep rows and rows of spaces chained off so you can't use them. All the time. Very annoying when it is taking you half an hour just to find a space, when you drive past them.

LuLu's is very popular store with the Indian community in Abu Dhabi. It sells a lot of their food anyway and has a clothes section that has all the clothes that you can typically see them wearing. One thing that strikes us in there is that very often you see young girls who are dressed like they are going to a party, or wedding or something. I don't know if this is because a trip to LuLu's is seen as an exciting trip out, or whether it's just girls dressing up just for the fun of it. I have to say though, they are big puffy, lace finished dresses you may have seen in the 1970s!

The food festival meant that there was a stage with some Bollywood dancing and some tasting areas for Indian food and some extra counters to buy some take away Biryanis of various sorts.

One display caught my attention, which was of various strange and enormous vegetables (I guess) that are indigenous to India. If anyone who can help with naming them, I would be interested.......





6 comments:

  1. Hi Neil, you should try the Khalidya mall Lulu's. It's much quieter, and we always get parked with no hassle in the underground carpark. As for the spaces they keep all chained up, I have no idea, another case of AD logic!

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  2. Good call... we'll give it a whirl!

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  3. Neil, I agree with you on the bread quality. Most of it is too dry and hard. I am partial to Kingsmill too so I get it at LuLu Express in Al Raha Beach mall.

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  4. The factory it is made in was just a few miles up the road from where we lived, so I guess we are biased! They do sell some kind of lovely America sandwich loaf at Spinneys, and it lasts fort ages - but I remember it being way expensive

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  5. btw... Vedabread, tried Khalidya mall LuLu yesterday... much better!

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  6. The brown roots in picture are called tapioca(Cassava or yuca or manioc). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapioca. Its the favourite food for people from Kerala

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