Saguna Baug Neral food review

The food served to us during our stay in the Pond House rooms at Saguna Baug, Neral was wholesome, tasty and properly cooked. However, don’t expect any great variety if you are staying for many days, as the vegetable for the meals as also the breakfast items tends to be repetitive and becomes boring. As mentioned here, we were disappointed at not getting some traditional items which we had definitely expected.

Each day we had a corn cob piece along with rice, dal, rotis, 2 vegetables, one sweet dish and buttermilk. On request, we also got curds. The best we liked: the sweet dish. At least there was variety in the sweet dishes. Day 1: sheera (afternoon) and gulab jamun (night); Day 2: dudhi halwa (lunch) and banana-aamras-milk combo (dinner –the one sweet dish which did not appeal to us); Day 3: shrikhand (fabulous!) for lunch and sevai kheer (also very good) for dinner.

3 days menu to give you an idea of what was served:

Day 1 

• Breakfast: Onion poha and sabudana kichdi
• Lunch: Rotis, corn cob, mixed vegetables sabzi, channa in gravy, cucumber-carrot-tomato slices, sheera.

• Dinner: Thandlacha peethachi bhakri with green chillies’ thecha (extremely spicy, guaranteed to make your eyes water!), mixed vegetables sabzi, cucumber-carrot-tomato slices, gulab jamuns (very good).

Day 2 

• Breakfast: Onion poha and upma
• Lunch: Rotis, corn cob, potatoes-cauliflower sabzi, masoor, cucumber-carrot-tomato slices, dudhi halwa.
• Dinner: similar to lunch, with different mixed vegetables, aamras-milk combo.

Day 3 

• Breakfast: masala dosa (that was a good change!)

• Lunch: Rotis, Chole, masala bhindi, corn cob, rice & dal, mango shrikhand, butter milk
• Dinner: Rotis, masoor, potato-papdi sabzi, kothimbir wadi, sevai kheer (very well made)

Day 4 

Breakfast only (we left on that day): Sabudana khichdi

On all days, rice & dal, fried papads, chaas & dahi and yellow bananas were available. Kothimbir wadis were also available on 2 days for lunch & dinner. Don’t miss eating these – really well made, properly crisp & tasty.

You can also order non-vegetarian food - fish & chicken is available on prior request. The fish is from their own freshwater ponds. The 2 non-vegetarian members of our group had both. They declared it to be oily and heavy (the fish they found too large & had hoped for smaller species) but tasty too.

A few things to note here:

• If you are staying overnight, you can request for early morning tea, which is brought at 7.30a.m. along with a packet of Parle Glucon-D biscuits. The 4p.m. tea is not accompanied with biscuits or snacks, so you could bring along some light snacks if you wish.

•  Enough quantity of food is brought for the meals, so you can ask for more helpings with no extra cost.
• As soon as the tea and food arrives, sit to enjoy it. It becomes cold quickly and you will lose out on enjoying the extremely good hot ginger-lemon grass tea and the hot dal. The rice and rotis though were disappointingly not hot, not even warm.
• It is a good idea to ask beforehand what will be there for the afternoon and night meals. On the first night of our stay, we were given thick rotis made from rice flour (called thandlachapeethachi bhakri). We each happily ate one full one and then had rice-dal, only later discovering it was far too heavy. So the next 2 nights we requested plain rotis with the dal & rice. 

Probably due to the climate, the meals did tend to feel like it had settled on a shelf in our tummy!