3 restaurant veterans unite to open Mandala Indian Cuisine in Saratoga
With a collective decades of restaurant experience behind them, three industry veterans — chefs Dilip Gurung and Manjees Adhikari and front-of-house manager Raj Shrestha — have opened Mandala Indian Cuisine on Saratoga’s Big Basin Way.
This sophisticated newcomer to the restaurant row features an extensive menu of contemporary and traditional Indian dishes — plus a few surprises — served in a chic setting with a wine bar. Outdoor tables are also available.
Appetizers range from vegetable samosas and avocado chaat to Nepalese-style chicken momo dumplings and spicy prawns peri peri, with Afro-Portuguese roots. A dozen vegetarian curries are offered in addition to the long list of chicken, lamb and seafood dishes. And from the clay oven come tandoori Chilean sea bass, mint salmon tikka and rack of lamb.
Instead of a traditional midday buffet, the owners pivoted to a “bento box” offering at lunchtime, with more than 30 entree choices. “We’ll continue in the future
as we’re getting a good response from our customers about the bento boxes,” Shrestha said.
DETAILS » Open daily for lunch, 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., and dinner, 5 to 9 p.m. (Friday and Saturday until 9:30) at 14510 Big Basin Way, Saratoga. www.mandalaic.com/home
East Bay pizzerias team up with S.F. Giants on fundraiser
It’s pizza for a good cause.
Pizza champion/restaurateur Tony Gemignani and San Francisco Giants Brandon Belt and Alex Dickerson have teamed up to create specialty slices for the fifth annual George Mark Children’s House benefit.
Through Sept. 26, buy a slice of pizza or a whole pie at Gemignani’s Slice House restaurants in San Leandro, Walnut Creek or San Francisco and a portion of the proceeds will be donated to this San Leandro facility that serves the families of youngsters who are facing a life-limiting health diagnosis.
A donation of $1 from each slice and $6 from each full pie sold will be donated to the Children’s House. Customers may choose from Belt’s Monster Meat Pizza, a meat-vegetable combination of pepperoni, sausage, bacon, red and green onion, bell pepper, with shaved Parmigiano and Romano cheeses and a side of chile oil; or Dickerson’s Double Header, which features two kinds of pepperoni — thick Rosa Grande and thin cup ’n’ char slices — with tomato sauce, Romano cheese, garlic oil and oregano.
The price is $6.50 per slice and $39 for a full pie.
Founded in 2004, the George Mark Children’s House provides palliative care and other services to families.
DETAILS » The restaurants are located at 1500 Mt. Diablo Blvd., Walnut Creek, and 135 Parrott St., San Leandro. www. slicehousesl.com
Museum of Ice Cream melts into San Francisco history
If your bucket list included “lounge in a pool of faux candy sprinkles,” you will now have to travel to accomplish that life goal.
The Museum of Ice Cream, a pop culture phenomenon that opened to huge crowds in 2017 and vowed in 2018 to stay open “until infinity,” shut down during the pandemic and now has closed permanently in San Francisco.
The news was first reported by the SF Business Times, which declared that “the San Francisco exodus has extended to ice cream.”
However, the New York City museum remains open, and there are new Instagram-friendly locations in Austin, Texas, and Singapore.
But San Francisco was the first permanent home for the museum that took New York and Los Angeles by storm before coming to the Bay Area. Here, tickets for the first run sold out in 18 minutes — at $38 a pop.
From 2017 to late 2018, the San Francisco installation on Grant Avenue demonstrated its local and global allure, with half a million visitors from 65 countries visiting, the museum said.
What was the appeal of the theme park-like exhibit besides the ice cream samples and a “pool” of sprinkles to frolic in?
“It’s like Willy Wonka married Mary Kay in Victoria’s Secret, moved to a house on a Candyland game board and adopted the Pink Panther, My Little Pony and Hello Kitty as pets,” our reviewer Angela Hill wrote when the museum opened.