Pondicherry's charm comes to Chennai in the form of it's illustrious venture Bread & Chocolate. Pondy is known for it's bakeries and known to dish up a variety of stuff especially on the sweetened side and it makes sense too since it does happen to be a French colony. Hence the presence of vintage French style cuisine is pretty evident.
The pizza's, breads, croissants, creme brulees, macaroons, crepes and a whole lot of chocolate and various other sweet tinglings find much footing in the shores of Pondy. Hence the presence of Bread & Chocolate, a premium Pondy outlet putting up it's venture in Chennai is sure to seethe in some bit of excitement.
The outlet here is located in Senotaph Road, Teynampet in a two storied building. You feel the whiff of fresh bread and smell of cream as you set foot inside it's territory. The ground floor is for takeaway and has an array of delightful stockings layered up for you to choose. The portion upstairs consists of the dine-in restaurant.
The menu is a simple one pager compartmentalized into 5 categories comprising of toasts, bowls, plates, hot pressed sandwiches and drinks. The initial three form part of the breakfast and is available all through the day whereas the latter two options are available only from lunch onwards. This apart, the stacked up assembly gives you plenty of options on croissants, cakes, babkas, quiche, focaccia etc.
I have been here once for dine-in and tried their super famous best seller 'Summertime Tartine'. This was one dish which I had been drooling about ever since I had a glance at the picture and I must say it was worth the wait. I've normally consumed burgers of the messy kind but this one is a toast loaded to the brim and it only gets more yummyliciously flowy once you give a poke at it. It is a toast packed to the punch with fresh ricotta, marinated onions, roasted tomatoes, poached eggs and basil pesto. The scramble of ricotta spread across the toast with the effervescence of a glorious pesto and a ballooned up egg which smatters the yolk once you give a tilt at it makes the experience quite exhilarating. This has been a long pending item to consume and glad to finally have had a shot at it. There are quite a lot more options on toasts which I guess would be reserved for a next time.
Other than this, I tried more of their snack based items. A little disappointed to have still not got a crack at their lemon meringue croissant which I've been badly wanting to try. The palak panneer quiche was big in size and I really liked the spinach cream breached oozingly across the flaky bread. The pizza focaccia was decent albeit not something to glorify upon. I personally felt a little extra zest was missing on it. The chocolate cake was quite nice thought not too memorable.
Overall, it has been a fairly interesting experience trying out selected items from the fray. I am looking forward to try some of their sandwiches and also drinks perhaps on a later visit. This can be considered a great place for breakfast especially and if you're looking for that fresh dough bread experience that is famous in Pondy, you do get a selective dose of it right here in very own Chennai and that's something which is certainly a bright spot. The place is out and about buzzing in full steam and with more of these fresh stuff coming to Chennai, it's sure to set the registers ringing.
