I like Indian food and I like Italian food. But Indian-Italian fusion? I had trouble imagining it, so it was with some trepidation that my friends and I headed out to Digress, one of the restaurants on our recently developed ‘we should try this place sometime’ list (which gets longer every week).

Tucked away on Akuna Street in Civic (near Transit Bar), the entrance looks more like a nightclub than a restaurant, and we soon discovered that’s because Digress has two components: the restaurant and a lounge. We made our way into the restaurant part, where we were seated by a friendly waitress.

Looking over the menu, we found that the fusion was more or less an Italian base (e.g. pasta, pizza, risotto), with an Indian ‘topping’ (for want of a better word). After determining that the best way to try a bit of everything was to get one of each base, we then had trouble figuring out what ‘flavour’ to order, so asked the waitress for her recommendations. Thus we ended up ordering Tandoori chicken penne, garlic, chilli prawn and avocado risotto and Kadhai paneer pizza (cottage cheese, onion, capsicum, paprika, tomato, cheese, coriander). And some kind of cheesy naan bread while we waited for the mains to arrive.

The naan was delicious and we made short work of it, hoping that the other dishes would be just as good. Unfortunately, they were not. While nice enough, it was difficult to distinguish any major differences in the flavours between the pasta and the risotto dish, and the pizza, again while nice enough, didn’t wow us. We actually found that the concept of Indian-Italian fusion wasn’t as strange as we’d thought it might be, but rather—and this might sound odd—we found that the food didn’t taste Indian enough.

I’d hoped that because the concept of Indian-Italian fusion was so unusual that the food would have taken this to the extreme, such as making a really strong, flavourful Tandoori chicken like you would get in a purely Indian restaurant and mixing that with some delicious housemade pasta. My friends and I felt that what we got instead was a much more muted flavour, as though they were scared that if they made it too strong people might find it too strange and not like it. I think the opposite was probably true and if they’d gone all out for something that made the most of each culture’s cuisines, it would have been better. And while the pizza base was great (and which we later found out was made in-house), the pasta and risotto felt a bit stodgy.

The other issue we had was that although we were one of only two groups in the restaurant that night (our group was of three people and the other was of two people, noting that it was a weeknight), we actually found it quite noisy due to a function that was taking place in the lounge only a door away, to the point where my friends and I had a bit of trouble hearing each other across the table.

That said, there were some positives—my friend really enjoyed her mango lassi and I—as someone whose alcohol tolerance is extremely low at best—was excited to find they had a good selection of mocktails (so I could at least pretend like I could drink). I ended up going with the ‘Digress to Confusion’, which is pretty much letting the bartender make whatever they want, with some guidance to fruit juice flavours. The result was delicious, so much so that my friends actually had drink envy.

My experience is that places that do good mocktails do cocktails just as well, if not better, which bodes well for the lounge part of Digress (which I haven’t been to), as well as their soon-to-open venture, Mini Bar (where the Ticketek box office used to be). Chatting to the waitress, she told us that the Mini Bar would be an espresso bar by day, offering coffee and lunch (including butter chicken pies, samosas and Indian style wraps), and a cocktail bar by night.

So my final verdict is that I probably wouldn’t go back for the food, but I would hit up the lounge for some mocktails and maybe a dance on a Saturday night; and I’d be interested to check out the Mini Bar for a butter chicken pie during the day and the mocktails (yes again, it was really that good) at night (as well as the Mini Cooper and Rubik’s cube décor).

Have you eaten at Digress? What’s your verdict?