Barbecue in Dhaka

Last weekend our newly married friends organized a dinner for us at a restaurant in Dhamondi called Barbecue Tonight. The place was filled with locals and it was nice to get out of the diplomatic zone of Baridhara, Gulshan, and Banani. It took about 45 minutes to get out there even with light traffic on a Friday night. It is a popular spot with Bangladeshis and hard to get spots on some days but it would easily be passed by foreigners or people who didn't know about it for the much more flashier restaurants in the area. The place was a relaxed little hole in the wall with a lot of plastic tables and chairs outside. We sat in the small room inside and we were glad we did because the monsoon rains ruined a lot of delicious barbecue that night.
Our friends had ordered one of everything on the menu. First they brought out huge platters of chicken tikka and bread baskets with both nan and pataha. The nan was perfect and the pataha was a thinner, flatter bread, that is fried. It was also delicious. The chicken tikka was so tasty and very messy as you ripped if off the bone with your hands. After pulling the chicken off the bone I would wrap it in a piece of bread and add some of the delicious green yogurt sauce they had to it. The chicken was perfectly spiced, very tasty and not too hot. They also brought huge platters of legs of lamb and bowls of what I found out later to be brains mixed with other parts! A little jolting but actually very delicious. It was basically a thick, chunky gravy that was a bit oily but was good in the little wraps I would make with chicken and bread. The lamb was a bit dry and the chicken was by far my favorite. We brought wine to drink because of course they didn't serve alcohol. The wine made eating brains and huge hunks of meat a lot easier. For dessert there was faluda, a drink with hot pink and orange colored ice cream and sweet noodles in the bottom. It was yummy and sugary but I'm not sure I liked the texture of noodles in my ice cream. Overall, delicious dinner, although I always walk away from dinners at local restaurants wondering if I am going to regret it the next day. My tummy was fine with it though :)