On a Sunday when we were supposed to meet some relatives for lunch, the lunch date fell through at the last minute. We had to go to M-Block Market for some shopping, and decided to eat there—but M-Block’s dining options range between either the pretty expensive, like Diva and Rara Avis, to the really pedestrian Indian Chinese, which we avoid. Looking around for places to eat, we discovered this small eatery, newly opened (new enough to not yet have a credit card machine, either). The muffins advertised on their boards outside sounded mouth-watering, and since they had quiches, pies, sandwiches and wraps too, we decided we’d have a quick lunch here at Muffin Break.

Muffin Break is fairly small, a long, narrow space that is filled with six or seven tables. The décor’s pleasing enough—brown wood and cream upholstery, though perhaps they should think of something more creative for the walls than just posters claiming how fantastic they are. The menu (up on the wall next to the cash counter) was decidedly vague, with ‘sandwiches’, ‘wraps’, ‘pies’ etc listed alongside their prices, but no indications about what pies, wraps, etc were available. The man at the cash till told us that everything on display next to the till was available.

This wasn’t much, actually, because half the display counter is devoted to muffins. The other half is mostly cakes, with a couple of shelves left for sandwiches (which looked terrible—bulgy in the middle, thin at the edges, and with the bred certainly soggy) and other savouries. After some thinking, we settled for what looked the most appealing: chicken masala pie and something ambiguously labelled ‘cheese and olive’. "That’s a scone," the man at the counter said. "Do you want jam with that?" We said no, and he looked at us as if we’d lost our heads (or didn’t know what a scone was). "It tastes really good," he insisted, so much that my husband gave in and agreed to have jam on the side.

The individual pies and scones arrived, on china plates and with proper steel cutlery, soon after—and proved pretty awful. The meat in the puff pastry shell was chicken (I guess), but dry, and with hardly any flavour. Neither of us is a fan of spicy ‘masala pies’, but this one was just so bland, my husband had to ask for ketchup or mustard to give it some flavour.

The cheese and olive scones were, if anything, even worse. They were dry and stodgy and so difficult to swallow that we eventually ended up ordering coffee and tea just to be able to get the scones down our gullets. The cheese was conspicuous by its near-absence, and while there was a faint flavour of olives, it was far from being sufficient. What this needed was a good healthy glug of extra virgin olive oil, not jam (which, by the way, was a mass-market bottled jam of the type one finds in India: a gelatinous red goo made of some completely unidentifiable fruit).

Despite Muffin Break’s tall claims of a ‘wide range of coffees and teas’—the latter both ‘blacks and greens’, they only had one green tea. My husband ordered that, while I settled for a cappuccino. We’d also figured that since Muffin Break after all specialises in muffins, not pies or scones, their muffins would be worth trying. I ordered a pineapple coconut muffin, my husband a pecan strawberry bran muffin.

"You’re ordering something that isn’t on our menu," the man told my husband.
"I don’t know if it’s on your menu. It’s in the display."
Man comes around, has a look, mutters "okay", and goes back.

The muffins, tea and coffee arrived shortly after, brought by a waiter with very grubby fingernails. The tea and coffee were passable (how wrong can you go with a tea bag, hot water and sugar sachet?), but the muffins were very disappointing. In both cases, the first word of the muffin’s name—pecan, and pineapple—turned out to be the one thing in least quantity. My muffin had one tiny 1" slice of pineapple on top, with desiccated coconut dominating the rest of the muffin. My husband’s muffin had two pecan halves on top, and a little strawberry pulp here and there in the muffin, which was otherwise mostly just all bran. Both muffins were heavy, dense, and dry.

Our bill was Rs 627 (including taxes). It had originally been more, because the guy at the counter didn’t remember that they were advertising—on tent cards on each table—that diners got a coffee free with Rs 400 worth of food. It was only when we pointed this out that he removed the cappuccino from our bill.

Would I go back here? Maybe, if wild horses dragged me. Or if someone paid me a million dollars.

But I’d still protest.