Riding along the right flank of Royal Garden Hotel in Juhu is Opa, a new Mediterranean restaurant that serves up angular wooden interiors (think geometric ceilings and slatted panelling at Indigo Deli), delish cocktails and cuisine that is ambitious but not always successful. Our group of four went on opening weekend in party skirts and starched collars to find that we were the only diners there, surrounded by eager wait staff and strange, lounge-y music. All dressed up?

Open For Business

The superiority of the wait staff, rarity in Mumbai, deserves a second mention: they were efficient but didn’t hover, knowledgeable about the food and quick to inform us that the reason for the restaurant’s desolation was that most of their tables were booked out for a party of 28 who would be arriving later in the evening.

They also started us off with pretty cocktails, pomegranate martinis sweetened and garnished with long sticks of cinnamon, whisky concoctions tamed by apples and peaches, a mean (but alas, egg free) whisky sour. Ice tea was pretty good too, offered the one teetotaller at our table.

Opa Cabana

These were accompanied by a platter of hummus; smoky, garlicky baba ganoush; and muhammara that was sweet but still awesome, tasting of walnuts and sesame paste and serving as a nice counterpart to the intensely salty feta cheese in our Greek salad, which also yielded fresh bell peppers and neat triangles of spanakopita. The latter were slightly underdone, and could have used a few more minutes in the frying pan. Also try Opa’s interpretation of the Caprice salad, shells of mozzarella filled with feta cheese, doused in dressing and perched on rings of tomato. They might look like shrunken versions of the boiled eggs forced upon us every morning before school, but taste much better.

Mains here are less successful, consisting of woefully bland sundried tomato risotto that not even a huge dollop of crème franche could jazz up, as well as baby lamb chops that came on the bone and, to the initial delight of a carnivorous and finicky friend, were “perfect on the outside”. The insides, however, were less well done, with the meat undercooked, fatty and chewy, making him fret like a disappointed kindergarten teacher.

Chicken breasts stuffed with herbs and served with pools of smoky sauce and a rich column of mashed potatoes were well presented and pleasant, but nothing to write home about.

Portions at Opa are huge, which is why even our most sweet-toothed friends hesitated before ordering dessert. We should have skipped it completely, was the consensus when it arrived, a Jack Daniels and chocolate concoction that consisted of several layers of cake and mousse.  Frozen into a martini glass and studded with canned cherries, it was difficult to excavate and tasted of old school black forest pastry. Next time, we’ll get figs stewed in red wine instead, which appear in the appetizer section but should work perfectly for dessert.

Parting Shots

For it to work, Opa not only needs a more sure-handed kitchen but also a better scene, the vibrancy of people cheerful and well dressed, the commotion of many tables ordering at once, the bonhomie that comes from too many cocktails and big platters of food. They’re not there yet, but can arrive soon, spurred by a prime location and an interesting menu. Opa to that!

Getting there: Opa at the Royal Garden Hotel, Juhu Tara Road, Juhu, call 66919800, Rs 1,800 per head including one cocktail