Hot chick from Mexico

If you are in the mood for a quick bite but not a pizza or a burger - but love cheese - then head to Mex Chic'Inn Grand.

Here, the fast food outlet moves out of the food courts and into a proper sit-down restaurant. We decided to try it out at the end of a tiring week day.

Tex-Mex cuisine is usually very spicy with heavy use of meats and lots and lots of cheese.

Mex Chic'Inn, as the name suggests, only serves chicken and a few vegetarian dishes.

We started with fresh green pepita salad. Lettuce, cucumber, bell pepper, black olives and rings of onion topped with seasoned feta cheese.

You could have it just as or try with the accompanying pepita sauce and seasoned mayonnaise.

The mayonnaise was mixed with white squash paste, garlic and herbs. Yum. The mayonnaise went extremely well with the potato wedges too.

Potato wedges, yes, we had to have some of those, especially my nine-year old.

While she had her plain ones with the melted cheddar and salsa, we savoured them as Mexican fries topped with melted cheese, spicy chicken salad, lots of jalapeno and salsa and a big blob of sour cream.

With this we also shared a plate of classic veggie nachos. More cheese and fresh salsa.

Feeling quite full by now - the servings are quite big - we had our colas while we waited for the Burrito Arabia to arrive.

The restaurant also offers a selection of fresh fruit mocktails and juices, but just this once we stuck to the colas.

Though the chicken wrap had a very tempting look in the poster, it turned out to be a little disappointing.

It had the smell and taste of something that had been cooked just a little too long - to the point where the flavours lose their essence. Probably, the cook was just having a bad day.

I would have liked to try the paneer (Indian cottage cheese) dishes - Cilantro rice with Paneer or the Paneer tacos - but was just too full to eat any more. Maybe next time.

Dessert. Of course. We had planned to visit the famous ice cream joint, two doors away but changed our minds when informed the restaurant serves freshly made ice cream.

Abdul Kareem, the 'ice cream chef', offered us tastes of his fresh fruit yoghurt-based ice creams. Mango and strawberry. Good. An Indian would be reminded of the desi fruit-flavoured lassi (yoghurt drink).

Other flavours include fresh grape and a tangy lemon (too tangy). Apart from the regular chocolate and vanilla, a chocolate-vanilla mousse flavour was also available.

The surprise, however, was the kesar-badam (saffron-almond) - an Indian flavour in a Mexican restaurant.

We left for home a happy family with our scoops of mango and strawberry yoghurt-based, and chocolate-vanilla mousse ice creams.