It’ll be packed in here just as soon as that liquor license arrives, our waiter insists. We certainly hope so, because despite its frills and thrills - vintage motorcycles wall art, bar lights assembled from rearview mirrors and headlamps, a long bar and gleaming DJ console - Revv Café is currently little more than two floors of desolate space within a bustling market.

But sure, we say encouragingly to the eager wait staff, including the owner (he also held a stake in Hell’s Pizza, the restaurant Revv Café is replacing), sipping on cloyingly sweet ice teas and not-very-minty mint lemonade, trying to look excited as we choose from a standard menu of pastas, grills and burgers.

One in a Pillion

Our Mediterranean chicken salad arrives first, in a promising plumage of gleam and green. Sadly, it turns out to be unpleasantly sharp, doused in angry dressing that wipes out any other flavour. Beer battered fish fingers, however, are redeeming, piping hot with a creamy tartar dip on the side.

Motorcycle Dairies

Next up is a spinach crepe, herb dusted and drizzled with cheese, unsexy but pleasingly simple; and a disastrous burger stuffed with cold beef tenderloin and accompanied by soggy fries. The only dessert on offer is a slice of overwhelming chocolate cake – too much chocolate, it turns out, isn’t always a good thing.

Ride on

Perhaps our waiter was right, and once Revv Café procures its bar license it will roar to life, serving chilled beers and (less sweet) cocktails to the after work crowd while they sit at the long bar, snack on fish fingers and bitch about their bosses. But for now, we suggest you bypass it completely.

Getting there: Revv Café, M 22, Greater Kailash I, call 40571871 or 8447025250, Rs 2,000 for a meal for two without alcohol.

bpb pays for its own meals and conducts all reviews anonymously.