I choose to eat at their Chinese restaurant, the Golden Phoenix and ordered a meal entirelyout of the garlic menu. To start with, I had a Tomato Creole, which is basically tomato juice that has been whipped up with some garlic in a blender. Nice idea to give the tomato juice an additional tang. Maybe you could try it at home too along with some tabasco, pepper and salt.The appetiser was a chicken soup, again flavoured with garlic. The main course was garlic fried rice with fried prawns in white garlic sauce and fillet chicken in fired with chopped garlic and butter. Don't worry, their food did not have an overdose of garlic. In fact, the fried rice didn't even faintly smell of it, the prawns were very bland but the chicken was deliciously tangy. Everything was fine until I ordered the vanilla ice cream with garlic. The innovative guys in the F&B have pounded garlic and blended it with the vanilla ice cream and reset it. It was served with flakes of garlic dipped in chocolate for decoration. And that is where the problem lay. While the food was not too heavy on the garlic flavouring, the ice creamhad a heavy dose of it, which left me with a heavy garlic breath. But then you can't go to a garlic promotion and expect to come away with clean-smelling breath. Garlic-haters will have to wait a while till something more suited to their palate comes up. Chillies will be the next on the hotel's promotional menus to add fire to your appetite, followed by lemon grass and then cheese.

But you can go ahead and order the garlic dishes unabashedly, if you like to eat food that has a tang to it. The garlic drinks, both cocktails and mocktails, and desserts are common to all the seven restaurants in the hotel and each of the restaurants has some special garlic dishes. A garlic plant decoration on your table top, instead of the usual rose-filled vase, along with a garlic design badge on the waiter's uniform will subtly remind you that the garlic promo is on. Just hope you meet a vampire on your way home. And just in case you bump into someone special, carry a bottle of mouthwash along.

-- Vidya Deshpande