Dancing at Studio 29. Photo courtesy of Sangeeta Chopra.

“I’d go there with plenty of four anna coins for the jukebox, and have espressos and hot dogs for Rs1.25 each. Napoli was an open, noisy cafe. The owner always managed to have the latest vinyls, and five bucks was enough for two people to have a snack and a coffee each. One car would go down the street every half hour, a Dodge Kingsway, or a Baby Hindustan – the precursor to the Ambassador, modeled after the Morris Minor – or an Austin A40, or a Studebaker Commander, and it would always be jam-packed with high school or college kids, who would all pour out of it at one of the spots on the streets. We’d listen and dance to Elvis, Bill Haley and the Comets, Connie Francis, Helen Shapiro…in the evenings we’d go to Moka at the Airlines Hotel (near the Ritz Hotel). At first none of us knew what the name meant, but soon our Parsi teachers at Xavier’s Boys’ Academy told us that it was a coffee drink.”

That’s just one of the many stories I hear from my dad a few times every year. They come up at all sorts of times. Like when we walk down Marine Drive to Veer Nariman Road after dinner to have ice cream sandwiches at K. Rustom. Or when we have a family dessert of Baked Alaska at Gaylord. Napoli, Talk of The Town and Volga are just some of the other places he would frequent. And they were all in what was once Bombay’s hippest neighbourhood, in and around one street: Churchgate Street Extension, now known as Veer Nariman Road.

The area may have lost some of its shine over the last decade, but from the 1960s until the mid ’80s, it was home to the most popular dining and drinking establishments in town. Restaurateur Riyaaz Amlani, who opened Mocha in 2001 in the spot previously occupied by his father’s restaurant Berry’s, continues to be bullish about the stretch, and will soon open a Salt Water Cafe in the same location. “It’s an arterial road in the heart of Bombay’s Art Deco district, and a very historic space in Mumbai’s nightlife,” he says.

Every cuisine that was popular then was represented on and around the street. If you wanted a multi-course menu offering fried oysters, steak and creamed spinach, all served by doddering waiters, you went to Gourdon, now Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank near the Asiatic department store. For Gujarati food and lots of farsan served in silver thalis, you went to Purohit’s, now Indian Summer. For hot chocolate and Marquise cake there was Bombelli’s, now Shiv Sagar. Owned by a Swiss man named Freddi Bombelli, Bombelli’s also had a branch near Amarsons in Breach Candy.

“There was nowhere else to go,” says my friend Anandita’s dad, Sudhir Shah, who spent a lot of time in the area between 1958 and 1975. “The top three places in the city for dinner and dancing were The Other Room [at the Ambassador], The Little Hut at The Ritz, [and] The Rendezvous at the Taj. For all-day coffee and snacks, there was only Bombelli’s, Parisian Cafe, Volga, Gaylord and Monginis. My dad would take me for sponge cake, cheese toast, and puff pastries to Monginis. Places would have morning jam sessions, from 11am to 1pm, during which there would be no dancing. An orchestra would play, we’d listen and drink tea and coffee.” Eventually Parisian Cafe became Talk of The Town, which became Jazz by The Bay, then Not Just Jazz by the Bay and is now Pizza by The Bay. Napoli and then later Volga stood where the recently-shuttered Chopsticks is located. Monginis occupied the spot in Fort that now has Akbarallys, which bought over the brand.

The Other Room was a universal favourite for its music, dancing, cuisine, and crowd. In Naresh Fernandes’s book Taj Mahal Foxtrot, he writes that in the 1950s The Ambassador was “managed by a cigar-chomping Greek named Jack Voyantzis”. When The Society (which today is best known for Spaghetti a la Fernandes, a dish named after the chef who created the recipe) was full, Voyantzis would invite people to “‘the other room across the hall, where’s there’s music and dancing.’ The name stuck. The menu at The Other Room featured Greek, Hungarian, Swiss and Burmese dishes.”

Voyantzis also gets a mention in singer and musician Biddu’s memoir Made in India. He writes about an incident in 1964, when he just arrived in Mumbai: “We turned left into Churchgate and right there on the left side of the road was the Ambassador Hotel, a small but prestigious four-star establishment. We were greeted by the owner. Jack was a bear of a man, as wide as he was tall, with a handshake as firm as clamping irons and a voice that rasped like sandpaper. ‘Welcome. You play here,’ he said in his guttural English, taking us into a little room, plush with velvet curtains and tables for two and four with light-pink tablecloths and lilac walls.”

Theatre actor Sabira Merchant, who launched one of Mumbai’s earliest discotheques Studio 29 at the Bombay International Hotel (now Hotel Marine Plaza) in 1980, loved the “beef strips in creamy sauce flambeed in brandy” at The Other Room. Merchant recalled how people would dance to a four-piece band at the restaurant, and come back to their table to drink hard liquor out of teapots during the Prohibition years, which lasted until 1973. Pink gin – a mix of gin and bitters with a slice of lime and some ice - was the thing to drink. “It was only that little stretch [in Churchgate] where we could go out to eat,” says Merchant.

At Gourdon, expats, tourists, consulate employees and advertising professionals would chow down on British food as well on crisp pickled onions, jars full of which were kept on the tables. Tea Centre and Samovar (inside the Jehangir Art Gallery), both of which still exist, were more affordable and would attract the poorer literati, while Gaylord was much the same as it is now, except that it had a band, as did Berry’s and Talk of The Town.

Like Gaylord, Tea Centre and Kamling (which opened way back in the late 1930s), some of the smaller establishments such as K. Rustom and Stadium are still around. Retired IPS officer and Bombay Local History Society member Deepak Rao remembers going often to Stadium restaurant in the Lalji Naranji Memorial (Indian Merchants’ Chambers) building, to pick up mutton samosas with his school friends. Rao walked up and down the street with me and from his archives showed me street directories from the 1930s and 1940s, as well as newspaper advertisements of Kamling, Moka Bar, and Asiatic Stores when it used to be an Irani restaurant with waiters wearing white shirts and bow ties.

In the 1980s, members-only discotheques such as Studio 29, The Cellar at The Oberoi, and 1900s (which replaced Blow Up) at The Taj Mahal Hotel became the places to be. Marine Drive’s Bombay Club, which was designed by English architect Claude Batley (who worked on many of our city’s iconic structures including the Bombay Gymkhana and Cusrow Baug), became the Nataraj Hotel. The hotel was initially best known for the Kebab Korner restaurant and Yankee Doodle ice cream parlour, and later for RG’s, the discotheque named after owner Ravi Ghai. The al fresco Yankee Doodle had semi-circular marble booths and a swing, and served sundaes like the Top Notch and Hot Notch.

“Studio 29 and RG’s saw the jet set crowd of the city,” says businesswoman Deveika Bhojwani. “People were not so conscious of dressing up in the ’70s and ’80s unless they went to a discotheque, or for a celebration.” Unlike today’s luxury brand-obsessed revelers, disco goers of yore wore jersey bell bottoms and suits, bought accessories from trips to Bangkok, and drank Alcazar vodka or Rs40-a-bottle wine, says businessman and long-time party goer Kishen Mulchandani. The dancing was more important than the drinking. “If you were a member at The Cellar, 1900s and RG’s then you really were something,” he says. “Nobody cared about which building you stayed in, or what your surname was. Everybody paid the same membership to get into the club, so it didn’t matter. There was individuality, not like today when everybody dresses the same.”

Then airline crews would frequent these discos during their layovers, and getting to hang out with them was more interesting than sidling up to the superstar actor dancing alongside recollects Mulchandani. To end the partying, everyone would land up at the Shamiana at The Taj for cappuccino, or Samarkand at The Oberoi for cold coffee, but there was no such thing as a deadline. “Now, people drink six drinks in two hours,” he says. “Then, people drank two drinks in six hours.”

Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and the restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.

Cutlets from Lourdes Fast Food.

A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from my friend Sameer Seth. It said, “Was walking down Bazar Road the other day and saw this gentleman setting up a folding table with a hot box of chapatis. Long story short – ended up have some amazing pork sorpotel and home-made chapatis – vinegary porky goodness!” There was also an attachment. It was a photograph of a slightly crumpled paper menu. It looked much like one of those photocopied flyers that are tucked into the newspaper. The menu listed over 50 items, including - along with sorpotel, vindaloo and beef chilli – bottle masala, chicken pan rolls, fugias, and wedding rice.

To say I was restless to try Lourdes Fast Food’s fare would be an understatement. At first, from reading the email, I thought that Lourdes was a little stall on busy Bazar Road selling a couple of Goan dishes. Then, a closer look at the menu revealed that, in fact, Lourdes’ flavours are all East Indian. I Googled the name of the shop. There were no results relevant to Mumbai. (The first result was a video of pop star Madonna’s daughter Lourdes eating fried chicken.) Lourdes Fast Food wasn’t on any of the food listings websites either.

What I find strange about East Indian food in Mumbai is that there are very few restaurants that serve it (though there are a few thelas around Gorai). Few people outside the community – apart from those who have East Indian friends or live in East Indian pockets of the city such as Byculla, Bandra, and Malad – know anything about the cuisine. Yet, this is a community and a cuisine that originated right here, in Mumbai. East Indians were originally Marathi-speaking local fishermen and farmers who converted to Roman Catholicism under the Portuguese. The community adopted the name East Indian on the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria to distinguish themselves as North Konkan Catholics, and British subjects (as opposed to immigrants such as Goan Catholics who were Portuguese subjects).

I spoke with a few East Indians in Mumbai’s food industry for a little history and perspective. “All East Indians were born and brought up in Maharashtra,” said Glyston Gracias, the chef-manager of Smoke House Deli. “Before the conversions, we were grouped by vocation – kolis (fisherman), shetkaris (land-owning farmers), bhandaris (brahmins) and salt-pan owners – and we worked with a barter system. When we converted, the East India Company supported the community, offered wages and security, on our own land.” As with most Indian communities, there are minor differences in the way East Indians with different background eat. For instance, Kolis eat more fish, and shetkaris eat more meat. “Everybody eats the same dishes, but there are variations across the community,” said Gresham Fernandes, the executive chef of Impresario Entertainment & Hospitality, which owns Salt Water Cafe, Smoke House Deli and the Mocha chain of coffee shops. “But East Indian food and language [dialect] is completely different, even from Goan cuisine,” said Fernandes. “Our masalas, like our [universally used] bottle masala use dry spices. Goans use more wet chilli-based pastes.”

Indeed, the first taste I’d had of East Indian food was at Fernandes’ home, where I ate a meal prepared by his mother Ancida for a trial run of The Gypsy Kitchen last month. There, a motley group of diners feasted on sweet home-made grape wine, tangy pork tamrial, chicken khuddi, crepe-like chittaps, handbreads or appas, and more. The flavours tasted familiar yet completely new. The appas, for example, reminded me of bhakris, but were more rough-hewn and fluffier.

Last week, I finally made my way to Bazar Road, the busy market street to the east of Waroda Road and walked up and down until I came across the husband-and-wife team of Gilroy and Lourdes Nunes, who started Lourdes Fast Food five years ago. I sampled a prawn cutlet, a mince chop, and some masala-fried kite fish from their tray, while they told me about how East Indians prefer cooking at home and eating their own food rather than going out. Lourdes prepares everything they sell at their home, which is a few minutes walk away from their table. As the evening went by, and things ran out, she’d go home and return 15 minutes later with a fresh batch of hot food. The table’s offerings, however, are limited to snacks, and a few cold bags of sorpotel and vindaloo, ready to heat-and-eat. Most of the items on their menu are available on order, and Gilroy does deliveries himself. Even though the Nunes’ business is not listed, they have a steady stream of customers that live in the neighbouring area (though Lourdes was recently quoted in a recent Times of India story about bottle masala).

The day after I visited Lourdes Fast Food, I called Paul Kinny, the executive chef of the InterContinental Marine Drive, and asked him to recommend East Indian cookbooks. “There are hardly one or two,” he said. “One came out few years ago, but it was more Goan.” Kinny told me that one of his cookbooks is about 30 years old; I hope to photocopy it soon.

Each of the three chefs I interviewed for this column wants to raise awareness about their community’s food. Gracias said that he rues the fact that East Indians haven’t traditionally shared recipes with the next generation. Even when mothers-in-law share recipes with daughters-in-law, they intentionally leave out an ingredient or two, or alter a technique, he said. Kinny told me that his wife Smita makes and sells sweets unique to East Indian cuisine such as fugias, and date and walnut rolls. Fernandes, meanwhile, mentioned the East Indian food festival that is held at St. Anthony’s Church in Vakola in November. I’ve already marked in my diary.

WHERE TO ORDER FROM
Lourdes Fast Food
111D Bazar Road, opposite National Bakery, Bandra (West). Tel: 98670 45434.
Nunes makes everything from brain cutlets to fresh bombil pickle. Orders must be placed at least one day in advance. From Rs 12 for a cutlet or a chop to Rs500 for a kilo of curry such as beef ball curry or chicken khuddi. Bottle masala, Rs1,000 per kilo.

Smita Kinny
NL6, Building 3, Flat 6, Indraprastha Society, Sector 10, Nerul. Tel: 2770 2333/98331 81777.
From November 10 until mid-December every year, Kinny takes orders for fugias, marzipan, milk cream, kulkul, date and walnut roll, and other sweet treats. Customers can pick up their orders from December 22 to Christmas Eve. From Rs500 to Rs900 for a kilo.

Kimenna “Kim” Godfrey
111A Bazar Road, Bandra (West). Tel: 98201 13825.
Godfrey offers evening tiffins with “one veg, one dry, one gravy, and one fry”, most of which is East Indian food. Apart from the dabbas, people can also order separate East Indian dishes such as khuddi, lonvas, chittaps, tongue roast, moile, and liver masala. Orders must be placed at least a day in advance. Rs150 for a tiffin.

Lalita Ferreira
House 99, Flat 101, First Floor, Misquitta Villa, Kalina, Santa Vruz (East). Tel: 99674 74994.
Get sorpotel, vindaloo, mince roll, pork chilli, fugias, and much more. Ferreira also sells bottle masala, fish masala, and vindaloo masala. Orders must be placed four days in advance. From Rs15 for a mince roll to Rs500 for a kilo of a curry. Bottle masala, Rs800 per kilo; fish masala, Rs700 per kilo; vindaloo masala, Rs700 per kilo.

Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and the restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.

Photo: Sheena Dabholkar.

About a week ago, a report in The Times of India informed us that every time we wade into the water off our beaches, we are swimming in shit. Not that we didn’t already know this, but the report told us that in the last year alone, the faecal coliform-to-water ratio in the sea off the coast of Mumbai has doubled. And even before this latest report, the volume was already twice the accepted standard along most parts of our coast.

The worsening quality of the water off our coast raises concerns about the seafood that we get from it. We don’t need to worry about rawas, surmai, pomfret, ghol, kane, and so on, almost all of which now come from trawlers who go farther out at sea, or towards the coast of Ratnagiri, Kutch, or other parts of the country. However, we do need to think about local shallow-water swimmers and bottom feeders such as bombil, clams, mandeli, mackerel, and some varieties of prawn that are picked out of the waters here.

I spoke with chefs, fish suppliers to restaurants, seafood distributors, and restaurant managers. All of them admitted that there is no way of knowing if the local seafood we eat is contaminated. “The fish which comes out of waters that are closer to our coast is not table-worthy,” says Ananda Solomon, executive chef of Vivanta by Taj. “Why, even the landing platform at Bhaucha Dhakka (Ferry Wharf, where fish arrives from all over the country) is questionable.”

Bombay duck, on the menu of almost all gomantaks, Irani cafes, and seafood restaurants, comes from just off our coast. Its body is made up of 80 to 90 per cent water, and the water from which it comes is toxic. Pollution, as well as climate change and overfishing, have caused stocks to drop, and prices for Bombay duck to escalate wildly, from about Rs40 per kilo five years ago to Rs150 today. Praful Takle, the manager of Trishna, which has been relying on the same supplier for the last two decades, says that within 15 years, all local seafood will be scarce and expensive. “We do all that we can to make sure that our bombil is safe,” says Takle. “We slit it open and wash it, and put it under a weight to remove excess water. If a customer even murmurs something about fish not smelling or tasting good, we remove it, no questions asked.” Still, he admits that neither him nor anyone in the restaurant industry, knows if any safety tests are done on the fish they serve. The industry runs on trust and luck.

“I will not serve mackerel or mandeli anymore,” says Gresham Fernandes, executive chef of the Impresario Group’s fine dining division. “There is no way of knowing if the fish is safe. If we want to test it independently, it costs about Rs3,000 to Rs5,000 per test. The whole [supply chain] process is very shady.” Fernandes recalls growing up eating cuttlefish, sea snails, sea cucumbers and skate from just off our coast. He says none of these varieties are available anymore, and even when they are, people prefer not to risk eating them. Generic varieties of frozen farmed fish from an ISO-certified company is safest he feels, even if it’s relatively tasteless.

“We’ve stopped buying fish from the local fishermen years ago,” says Sangram Sawant, managing director of seafood supplier PescaFresh. “I didn’t like the quality, and I didn’t feel it’s safe.” The company tests its fish at a private lab. Mumbai was a set of fishing villages, but now almost all fish sold here comes from elsewhere. However, fishermen who live along our coast still take day trips into the water off Worli and Mahim, and come back with whatever they get. These fish get sold to the masses in small local markets and on the streets in places like Bandra, Colaba and Dhobi Talao, and to smaller restaurants with high volumes and low profit margins.

“We serve rawas, red snapper, and ghol, and these come from the lower coast of Maharashtra,” says Abhishek Honawar, partner at Neighbourhood Hospitality, which owns Woodside Inn, Woodside and The Pantry. “Prawns and lobster come from farms off Roha and Ratnagiri.” The company’s fish supplier, Sanjay Chavan has been in the business for almost 20 years, and says that he has seen the supply pattern change from local fish, to fish that is brought here on trawlers from elsewhere, or shipped through a cold chain, but there is still very little traceability. No one can say for sure when or where the fish was pulled out of the sea. A “fresh rawas” off a trawler may have just come off the boat, but may have been pulled out of the sea five days before the boat arrived at the dock.

There is scant little being done to keep our waters clean, to keep our fish sustainable, or to preserve our marine biology. There isn’t even a proper grading system in place. Solomon says that what quite likely protects the masses from an outbreak of seafood-originated disease is the way we prepare our fish, in ample spices, and overcooked. “In 15 years we will know one way or another what we have done [to our city's seafood supplies],” says Fernandes. “When was the last time you went to the beach?”

Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and the restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.

Ricotta, mascarpone, mozzarella di bufala, fresh chevre, feta, creme fraiche and more are available in our city, and some of it hasn’t made its way here from Italy, France, or Greece. Over the last couple of years, Mumbai has had a fairly steady supply of un-aged, European-style craft cheese produced either in the city or elsewhere in the country.

Until a few years ago, a mere handful of people in Mumbai could talk about how mozzarella di bufala was an entirely different product from the standard processed and packaged stuff we put on our pizza. Now the balls of fresh, spongy, and easy-to-melt cheese are sold by two large dairy companies in north India: Dairy Craft (under the brand La Cremella) and Exito Gourmet (under the brand Impero). They have both figured out a way to get this cheese, known for its incredibly short shelf life, across the country into our city through a cold chain.

Closer home, we have cheesemakers who have decided to turn their passion project into a career. Karl Kothavala said he saw himself surrounded not by cargo pallets (which are part of his family business), but by creme fraiche. The founder of Say Cheese and Universal Kebab Kona (now in Sterling Cinema) started making cultured mascarpone two years ago when he found his grandma’s notes on cheese making. He grew a lactobacillus culture at home, and using YouTube videos, made his first batch of cheese. “I popped it into the cream and swirled it,” he says. ”When I saw that it was set the next morning, it was a Eureka moment.” For Mansi Jasani of The Cheese Collective, cheese-making goals were driven by goat’s milk. “No one was making fresh goat’s milk cheese,” she says. “Anyone can make fresh cheese at home.”

The operative word is “fresh”. Fresh cheese, which has not been aged, is much simpler to make, and requires less time and investment than an aged cheese, such as cheddar or gouda, even though it is more sensitive to time and temperature. “The biggest challenge with making bocconcini and mozzarella di bufala [is not production but] building a relationship of trust with our dairy farmers,” says Vijay Juneja, director of production at Dairy Craft. The company’s suppliers are small farmers who own between two to six buffaloes each. Dairy Craft has to make sure the bovines get the right feed, and even offers insurance against lower yields of milk. Of the 30,000 litres of buffalo milk processed by the company every day, only 1,000 is used towards mozzarella. The milk is chilled, pasteurised and chilled again. Enzymes called rennet are added, the set curds are cut to release the whey, and then it’s cooked or “washed” with hot water to make the stretchy cheese. This is then shaped into balls by machines that make them look like they are handmade.

Indian-made, European-style cheese may seem like a niche market at the moment, but it’s growing fast. Three years ago Exito Gourmet made one tonne of cheese a month. Nowadays, it’s more like 20 tonnes. “Imported cheese is harder to get, and more expensive,” says Puneet Gupta, the CEO of Exito Gourmet. “We decided to make it not just because it’s easy to make but because there is a growing demand for it.” Kothavala, meanwhile, has expanded his offerings to include Philly-style cream cheese, creme fraiche, and Boursin-style garlic and herb spreadable cheese. Jasani is planning to set up a temperature-controlled room and start aging her chevre. “Our local cheese is still a long way from a truly European flavour,” she says. “But all cheese in the world started like this, with people making it at home.”

Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and the restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.

Wood apples.

There are a few ingredients that are easy enough to find in this city, but are seldom used. And the ones who do use them, do so in limited ways. Which is a bit of a tragedy, because they are so much fun to experiment with. Here are some that I’m playing around with at the moment:

LOCAL FLAVOURS
Dink or gondh
Best known for being the main ingredient in dinkache ladoos sold at Maharashtrian sweet shops, dink (in Marathi) or gondh (in Hindi) are crystals of edible gum. They’re really very good for us, calcium-rich and full of soluble fibre. But the real reason I like them is because they’re so addictive. Anyone who’s had a dinkache ladoo knows the bland but deeply satisfying crunchy stickiness it has. Sindhis make a delicious digestive snack with gondh – the unfortunately named “fakki”, which also contains a bunch of other ground ingredients: misri (large sugar crystals), almonds, cardamom, fennel seeds, cumin, and black pepper. Hyderabadis make something similar called khurakh, Marwaris make churma with it, and Gujaratis put it in sheera. If you fry the crystals in ghee, or cook them in a microwave, they pop and become crackly, perfect for adding crunch to cookies, chocolates and brownies. Available at dry fruit shops in Mirchi Galli in Lalbaug.

Mogra flowers
We always have mogra (also known as Arabian jasmine) sharbat at home. It’s simple but tedious work. We open each flower and check it for bugs, then we make a sugar syrup and later in the evening, put about 25 to 30 flowers in a litre of the syrup and leave it to steep overnight (the flowers emit the most aroma at night). The next morning, we have bottles of complex, delicious, heady, edible perfume. What started for us as a simple drink of mogra syrup and iced water, is now a versatile addition to fruit salads, cocktails, jellies, and milkshakes, and can even be used as a condiment in ice cream, falooda and panna cotta. Available at Dadar flower market.

Wood apple
Limonia acidissima is also known as bael phal, elephant apple and monkey fruit. Wood apple, however, seems to be its most visually accurate name. It’s almost perfectly round, looks like it is made of mottled wood, and makes a hollow sound when you knock on it. Crack it open like a coconut, and it contains possibly the ugliest pulp of any fruit, lumpy, fibrous, brown with the funny smell of overripe papaya or jackfruit (though if it smells of rot, it is probably spoiled.) It has a fruity tartness, somewhat like berries, and the seeds in the pulp are slightly astringent. I’d buy a couple after school, scrape out the pulp from the hard shell, and mash it with red chilli powder, sugar, and a touch of salt. The result tasted like chaat – crunchy, creamy, sour, hot, sweet and salty, all at once. The pulp can also be made into chutney, sharbat, panna (like aam panna), pickle or marmalade, just like any other fruit. Available at ber and amla sellers at most markets in Colaba, Grant Road, Prathana Samaj and Khar.

Palli
Two years ago, we wrote about the joys of eating hara chana in winter. Since then, I’ve found out through family that my maternal grandmom’s neighbours – Sindhis from Larkana province – would make a saag from the leaves of the plant before it started podding. The leaves are plucked off the stems, washed, and then cooked in a kadhai with ghee, plenty of minced garlic, ginger paste, and green chillies, a touch of turmeric, coriander seed powder, and tomato paste. When cooked through, the dish is pureed using a mandira (the wooden whisk used to make lassi), and eaten with rice flour chappatis. Called palli, this dish evokes sarson ka saag, but tastes slightly different – more earthy, with the aroma of tender chickpeas. Ask any hara chana vendor in your vegetable market to get you stalks of the plant before it has podded. Hara chana will start showing up in markets around the end of this month.

BORROWED TASTES
Juniper berries
When I got them to take a sniff at my paper bag of juniper berries, the first thing many friends said was, “They smell just like gin!” They do, because juniper berries are what give gin most of its flavour. But juniper berries can also be used in spice rubs and marinades, as a delicate addition to garam masala, muddled into non-gin drinks, or as part of a sugar rim. Make a sorbet from them, have a buzz-free drink by making sharbat with them, sprinkle some powdered juiper into limbu pani, or add them to the spice mix when pickling fruit. Available at Asa Spice Station, FoodHall, Level 3, Palladium, Senapati Bapat Road, Lower Parel. Tel: 022 3026 4581.

Matcha
Matcha is the only kind of tea where you stir the bright green, fine powder into water and drink it up without straining the liquid. The powdery, slightly astringent drink may be an acquired taste, but matcha is available in other, more approachable forms in Mumbai. Healthy Treats in Bandra offers a matcha wholewheat cake, Fresh Healthy Cafe in Andheri serves a matcha smoothie, and Yauatcha in Bandra Kurla Complex puts the green dust in macaroons. Before I started drinking matcha as tea, I would add the finely milled powder to milk with a touch of jaggery to make a light milkshake. Because of its neutral, mildly tannic flavour, it can be added to any lightly sweet food like ice cream or mousse. Available at Gourmetco.in.

Kaniwa
Kaniwa, as appearances and nomenclature suggest, is closely related to quinoa – its little cousin – but is more nutritious, and can be used pretty much in the same way. What makes it special for me is that in texture, it’s closer to caviar than a nutty seed. When it’s cooked, the chocolate brown seeds look glossier, and pop more distinctly between teeth. It makes a fantastic garnish on fish, or as a dollop in a bowl of hearty soup. Toasted and then cooked into milk, it’s more fun than any other all-natural, unsweetened breakfast cereal. Next I want to try and use it as a crust in recipes that call for baking or pan frying. Available at Godrej Nature’s Basket outlets across the city. See here for locations. 

Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and the restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.

Making pav bhaji.

Featuring 306 items, spanning from a plate of idli with chutney and sambar for Rs55 to a vegetable sizzler “Alfredo” for Rs290, vegetarian restaurant Sukh Sagar in Chowpatty has one of the longest menus in the city. And yet, as anyone who has eaten there knows, the food hits the table within ten minutes of placing an order. Two people can easily have a full meal here for Rs400 in under 30 minutes. The three outlets, Sukh Sagar Restaurant, Sukh Sagar Snacks and Sukh Sagar Juice, all located in Girgaum Chowpatty, serve – according to Peter Lobo, the manager of Sukh Sagar Snacks – 2,000 people on an average weekday. I spent some time in the restaurant’s kitchen this week. They make it look easy, but it really isn’t.

Sukh Sagar is a ridiculously efficient factory of food, one that has been carefully calibrated for speed, value and consistency over the years. In a 430 square feet kitchen, about 30 to 35 cooks gather at 9am and start prepping for the day. By 10am, the mise en place – the preparation of ingredients for service – has been readied for all the snacks. By 11.30am, everything that should be available for lunch is ready to toss together and serve. Everything is prepared fresh every morning, which means that Sukh Sagar would rather 86 (restaurant lingo for saying that a dish is unavailable) items rather than store stuff overnight in the fridge. Over the years, the managers, kitchen supervisors and cooks have figured out how much food needs to prepared every day to minimise both leftovers and shortages.

There are six kitchen stations (or sections): Indian and tandoor, Chinese, Udupi snacks, sandwich and pizza, “continental” (including Italian, Mexican and sizzlers), and pav bhaji. The Indian station has three burners; the continental one has two burners and two fryers, the pizza station has two compact ovens to fire about eight small pizzas in total; and the Udupi section has two steamers with three trays each to make a total of 60 idlis at a go. The kitchen is ridiculously small for the volumes it churns out, and restaurant manager Manjunath Poojari, who is a relative of the owners, believes that the tight, tiny operation improves speed. “This way when one person starts running, everyone starts running,” he said.

Each section has five to six cooks, and most of them have been around for over two decades. There is no evidence of a formal system at first, but in a few hours, it’s easy to see that Sukh Sagar has somehow developed a version of Georges Auguste Escoffier’s brigade de cuisine for itself. Each station has a head cook, an assistant to the head cook, an assistant’s assistant, a helper and a cleaner. Everyone, even the cleaner, assists with the prep. Most of them are specialists who have been trained on the job. A few all-rounders move between stations to help when someone’s on leave. The head cook of the whole kitchen, Anand Satpal, has been with the restaurant for 30 years.

A typical day goes like this: Poojari brings produce from the vegetable market in the restaurant’s Maruti Omni every morning. On weekdays it’s about 30 kilograms, on weekends it’s double that weight. All of it gets packed into the long and narrow storage room, about half the size of a train compartment. Suppliers bring in other ingredients, such as paneer, which comes in three times a day, six kilos each time on weekdays, 12 kilos each on Saturday and Sunday. The morning starts out with what is best described as relaxed briskness. Each station assembles their mise en place, cutting (and where required, partially cooking) vegetables, preparing sauces, making masala pastes, shaping veg Manchurian balls, and so on. Ingredients are processed for every dish so that it takes only a few minutes to finish it when the order is placed.

For example, the cooks at the Indian station prepare three kinds of basic gravy: red, white, and Jain tomato gravy. They shape malai koftas, and cut and steam vegetables for veg Kolhapuri. The tandoor guy makes dough for naan, and marinates paneer for tikkas. The staff at the Chinese station minces ginger and garlic for dry dishes, makes basic sauces, and prepare the filling for spring rolls. At the continental station, they make ketchup-based pizza sauce, semi-cook pasta, roll out tortillas, and scoop out potato halves for the in-house-invention ‘pachkura potato fry’. (Sukh Sagar has many such novelties, including ‘vegetable hungroise’ with julienned veggies and spaghetti in paprika sauce; ‘mellows mushroom’ with crumb-fried cheese-stuffed fungi caps tossed in garlic sauce; and a Chinese item that involves tossing idli in chilli gravy). Until 11.30am, things stay easy. At lunchtime, when orders start hurtling in – almost one every minute – the kitchen starts buzzing. Cooks combine ingredients from their mise in various proportions to assemble dishes. At the Indian station, for example, each dish’s gravy is a mix of the three basic gravies, with a couple of extra touches. For veg Kolhapuri, Kashmiri chilli paste is combined with the red gravy and semi-cooked veggies, and reheated. Haldi and a touch of red gravy is added to the white gravy to make yellow gravy for kaju masala.

About 40 litres of red gravy and 30 litres of white gravy is made every weekday. “This combining of ingredients in various proportions is what gives it the Sukh Sagar taste,” said Poojari. “Every morning, each prepared sauce and ingredient is tasted by either the head cook, the kitchen supervisor or the manager, and whatever needs to be fixed is fixed.” The shift changes at 2pm, another round of prep takes place for dinner. At about 9pm, the morning lot comes back and helps with the final rush of the day. Most times, the kitchen is cleaned and closed for the night by 11.30pm.

Sukh Sagar was started in 1962 as a juice centre by Suresh Subba Poojari. When Satpal joined in 1982, the business had recently acquired Welcome restaurant down the street and rebranded it Sukh Sagar restaurant. Back then, there were about 100 items on the menu, and a plate of idli cost Rs5. “The menu changes a little bit every year,” said Manjunath Poojari. “The owner looks at the food trends in the city and decides to add and remove dishes.” Indeed, Sukh Sagar added Chinese dishes in the early 1980s, Italian food in the last decade, and Mexican in the last few years. “The important thing is to keep the kitchen hierarchy and system in a grip” said Poojari. “Tomorrow, if we add 15 to 20 dishes more to this menu, it’s not going to make any difference to the kitchen’s workload.”

Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and the restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.

If you’ve been following the current season of MasterChef Australia, which is in finals week in India, then you’d probably place your money on Rishi Desai. The Indian from Kolhapur has been called a machine by his fellow contestants for hitting the stove nose down, hand on knife. Desai, who was just in town to cook at the Sofitel in the Bandra Kurla Complex, spoke to us via email about stuffing up in front of his idol Heston Blumenthal, being a little sneaky to gain an edge, and achieving his dream of opening a modern Indian restaurant. Edited excerpts:

In ‘Dreams’ week, you said you would love to open a restaurant serving modern Indian food. Are you close to realising that? And will it incorporate flavours from your hometown of Kolhapur?
Modern Indian has always been my take on food. In India, the food changes every 100 kilometres, just as the language does. A lot of [Indian] restaurants, even here in Australia, focus on north and south Indian food, but there is so much more diversity [than that].

Having said this, modern Indian cooking is not fusion food. Fusion is completely different from what I am trying to say. In my pop-up restaurants, I wanted to test if people are open to my kind of cooking, and each of the five that I’ve had so far have featured Indian food.

For me, a restaurant is still a long-term goal and it will happen, but I have a few short-term goals to achieve before that. For one, my cookbook is coming out next year. Then I want to travel to India, to go to all the small places and explore flavours across the country. This way, when I open my restaurant, I will have plenty of arsenal. And yes, of course, my restaurant will have flavours from Kolhapur. One of the dishes I made in my pop-ups was slow-cooked mutton with cauliflower puree and papad. The flavours in the meat were identical to those of Kolhapuri mutton sukke.

What were the toughest parts about being a contestant?
Being away from the family. The show takes you away for five and a half months – that’s the amount of time it takes to shoot the season. My seven-year-old son and my wife live in Queanbeyan (near capital city Canberra) and during the show I got to visit them only once a month for about an hour each time.

You often seemed the most calm and collected during the challenges. Do you just work well under pressure or are you really good at hiding the panic?
I thrive under pressure. The first elimination was an eye opener for me. I would look around and assess the competition. Initially there were a lot of contestants in elimination so all I had to do was make sure I cook better than just one person from that lot to get through. So there was less pressure on me. But as we got down to the top ten the competition was tougher.

Everyone had different ways to relieve the pressure but I realised it’s better to take a step back, see what went wrong, and fix what had to be fixed. This was logically the least time-consuming way to solve the problem.

You always seemed to know almost immediately what you were going to cook and then just started executing it. Was there any challenge that tripped you up?
If you have a small number of ingredients in front of you, it’s easy to decide what you’re going to make as you have very few options to choose from. When you have an open pantry available, it completely confuses you. That happened to me during ‘Love’ week! I chose the wrong ingredients from the open pantry and then got a bit flustered and overcooked the pasta. Fortunately, I had an immunity pin to bank on as I ended up in the bottom three in that challenge.

The only time you seemed even remotely ruffled was during Heston Blumenthal week when you mucked up the dessert in the pressure test. Given that Heston is your hero, it must have been incredibly hard. 
When Heston Blumenthal was on the show, there was a lot of pressure on me to perform as he is my hero, and I didn’t want to disappoint him. I wanted to impress him with the use of liquid nitrogen, but my ice cream was a disaster. Still, it was the immunity challenge and I had nothing to lose. Yes, I failed to impress him but it was a good learning experience for me.

Gary, George, Matt – which of the three judges was the toughest to please?
All three of them are hard to please, because each of them brings different things to the table. Gary knows his Indian food, and so it was hard to impress him with Indian flavours. George is hard to impress under pressure – he notices if you have an untidy desk or an untidy station. Matt likes food history, so you better have a good reason and provide a background for any dish you make.

What dish were you most proud of cooking?
I was really proud of the reinterpretation of palak paneer I made. But conceptually, the hardest challenge for me was the modak dumplings. It needed the surprise element, it needed to taste good, and it needed to have theatre. It was hard – I wasn’t sure I could pull it off. It worked really well so I am proud of that dish as well.

During the ‘time auction’ challenge, you managed to outwit Samira and Jules by pushing them to bid away their time. It was a clever ploy, but some commenters thought it was a bit sneaky.
I took a gamble in that challenge, I had a hunch that both Samira and Jules did not want the rabbit and would give anything to have the lamb or the lobster. I took a bit of a risk, and let them bid away for the lamb and then played a strategic game with Jules with the lobster. I know it seemed sneaky, but at the end of the day it’s a competition and everyone’s there to win.

Were you aware of the show’s popularity in India and the possibility that a lot of people would be rooting for you? Did that help or hinder your performance?
I knew that the show was popular in India, but I didn’t expect this much popularity. I didn’t know that people were rooting for me until I saw people flock to my social media page as well as the events in Pune and Mumbai. Of course, popularity increases pressure. A lot of kids are watching the show, and you don’t want to let them down. You want to set a good example for the kids.

As a viewer first, how would you rate this year’s edition in terms of the toughness of the challenges and the quality of the contestants?
This year, we had a lot of team challenges, so a lot depended on how well you got along with others. On the previous seasons you knew what to expect week on week, this time that format was thrown out of the window, it was completely different. Once you were locked into the MasterChef kitchen, you had absolutely no idea what was going to come next. So I think it was a really tough season.

India vs Australia cricket. Who do you root for?
I sit on the fence, and I’m very happy when there is a draw (laughs). It depends on what kind of friends I’m watching it with. You don’t want to disappoint either Indians or Australians!

We’re in finals week here in India. Should Rishi fans be worried?
Without giving away a lot, finals week is a very interesting week for me personally. There are lots of ups and downs for me during this week. So stay tuned and keep watching.

Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and the restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.

Wild berries and lavender kheer at Masala Library.

In the last couple of months I’ve eaten dishes like jalebi caviar, pani puri stuffed with couscous, and panko-crusted kheema pao – all at brand new restaurants and bars in Mumbai. The dishes are Indian in their provenance, but unrecognisable to people who have been having regular jalebi rabdi, pani puri, or kheema pao for years. I’ve had two versions of pav bhaji, one at Masala Library, and one at The Spare Kitchen, both deconstructed, one served with brioche and a scatter of dehydrated vegetables, and the other in which the bhaji was served as quenelles. Last week, at new Juhu bar Copa, I noticed they had a three-cheese pav bhaji, served layered in a stack mille-feuille-style with mozzarella, Monterey jack, and local cheese.

One would think that pav bhaji is already wonderfully satisfying and complete in itself. It’s hardly the sort of dish that needs fixing or tweaking; it has been a popular snack in our city for over a century and yet chefs and restaurateurs have, in recent months, attempted to tinker with it. It’s not just pav bhaji. Indian dishes – especially the most familiar ones from our repertoire of comfort and street foods – are being increasingly refashioned by a handful of restaurants and presented in new formats. This approach, while somewhat new to Mumbai, is not new to the rest of the world.

Modern (or contemporary, or innovative) Indian food has been around for a while, and several Indian chefs have presented their versions of it. A few places have had a good long run, such as the now shuttered Tabla in New York City, which had dishes like apple and fingerling potato chaat; kale and sweet onion pakoras; and crab cake with Goan guacamole, papadum and tamarind chutney. A few continue to thrive. In London, chef Vivek Singh serves tandoori breast of partridge with dried mango and peanut and blackberry chutney at Cinnamon Club, and Dishoom offers “Guju chocolate mousse” with shrikhand. Among the most popular and successful ones in recent times (and a destination restaurant for many well-travelled Mumbaiites) is Gaggan in Bangkok. Chef Gaggan Anand, who interned at El Bulli just before launching his restaurant, calls his interpretation “progressive Indian cuisine”. I’ve had a meal at Gaggan. Few ten-course tasting menus (at 1,600 baht, about Rs3,100) are as jaw dropping, or as fantastic value for money.

Closer home, Indian Accent in Delhi (a city which I’d venture has a more adventurous palate than Mumbai) has won multiple awards for its food, which follows the same philosophy of imbibing sound Indian flavours with a certain playfulness. Chef Manish Mehrotra serves, for instance, a pulled pork phulka taco, and mishti doi cannoli. Mumbai had its first taste of modern Indian food with Ziya, which opened at The Oberoi three and a half years ago, replacing the well-loved Kandahar. In recent months, this trend has trickled down to newer more casual restaurants and bars.

Now we have a stand-alone restaurant, Masala Library, which plays with pan-Indian dishes – aloor dom served with salad jhal muri, anaar raita with rose spheres, and chaamp (chops) with a maple and kokum glaze. Copa offers peri peri egg burji tartine with bird’s eye chillies alongside sandwiches, burgers and pizzas. Level One has a thyme chicken tikka, and The Spare Kitchen strawberry rasmalai cheesecake, and a curry powder and cashewnut risotto. I suspect that over the next few months, we will have more such fooling around with flavour, texture and presentation.

This movement may not be just a small blip, but a long lasting one. Even MasterChef Australia hasn’t been spared. What distinguishes modern Indian food – according to the chefs and restaurateurs I spoke with – is not only playing around with texture, adding molecular elements, serving well-designed pre-plated portions, or adding (now that they are more easily available) international flavours to Indian food. It’s definitely not the mess that once went by the name of fusion food. It is, more than anything else, an element of surprise within the comfort of the familiar.

Three chaats at Ziya.

“It was a change waiting to happen,” says Gaurav Dabrai, director of Copa. “Restaurants tend to look westward and that trend has come full circle. Somewhere down the line the confidence to reinterpret our local offerings has set in. This stems from the fact that a lot of restaurants in London and New York City had started to play around with Indian food.” At Masala Library, during our meal, the servers made no secret of the fact that they want the restaurant to be among the first to win a Michelin star when the guide comes to India. “Indian cuisine, over the decades, has become a little boring and repetitive with the same dishes and presentation available everywhere, whether it is a five-star restaurant or a small roadside eatery, “says Zorawar Kalra, founder and managing director of Massive Restaurants, which owns the brand Masala Library. (His dad, restaurateur Jiggs Kalra is famous for being loyal to heavy, traditional North Indian food.) Zorawar Kalra says the restaurant is the company’s vision of presenting the future of Indian food, “Indian Cuisine – Version 2.0”.

Despite all the enthusiasm about it, modern Indian cuisine sometimes sounds and looks better than it tastes. It works best when the flourishes are accessories to good old flavour. At The Spare Kitchen, the curry powder and cashewnut risotto was way more fun than the couscous pani puri, because the substitution didn’t improve the flavour of the chaat, and in fact diminished it. At Masala Library, we left the dehydrated and redundant vegetables around the pav bhaji untouched. On the other hand, the jalebi caviar  – with lightly fermented batter sprayed into oil and swirled with sugar syrup – may have looked like salmon roe, but tasted exactly like tiny beads of jalebi, glazed with saffron, and was perfect with the cool creamy pistachio rabdi.

Modern Indian food is also more easily accepted abroad, because there is not as much context, either of familiarity or comfort, to Indian food there, as there is here. We also prefer eating our Indian food family-style, instead of having pre-plated individual portions. For over a year after Ziya opened at The Oberoi, it took some work to get local diners to take a shine to it. “Initially people were surprised,” says Satbir Bakshi, executive sous chef at The Oberoi, Mumbai. “Over the years, we’ve become more flexible. We’ve kept Ziya’s philosophy [of experimentation] the same, but we’ve also adapted to customer feedback.” They learned that sauced dishes work better than dry dishes for our palates, and that it makes sense to add a section of accompaniments that appease customers who really want their black dal with an Indian meal. Michelin-starred chef Vineet Bhatia runs very popular restaurants in London and Dubai serving similar food, but in Mumbai, Indian diners took a little more persuasion. The menu from 2010 looks far less accessible compared to the current menu. Now akhroti tawa seekh and chicken bisi bele have been switched for Bloody Mary jelly, and makhani ice cream.

Modern Indian food is less about reinventing the wheel, and more about putting it to different uses by adding a few new materials and functions. For the newer places offering this cuisine, it’s a bet they’re hedging. In addition to modernist forays into flavour, they also offer fail-safe options. Copa has burgers, pizzas and sandwiches. The Spare Kitchen has traditional dal and rice dishes along with some popular European fare. At Masala Library, some dishes, especially the mains, don’t push the envelope. With good reason. Customers take to a few dishes easily, and require persuasion to give others a shot. Anything that tries to be too clever alienates customers. At Copa, the pav bhaji works with beer drinkers, says Dabrai, but the servers have to explain the burji pav “tartine” to avoid disappointment. Three chaats at Ziya sells well, but subz shahshlik (skewered roasted vegetables) inexplicably didn’t take off.

Because this style is a work in progress, to get more customers hooked and prepare them for what to expect, newer restaurants have been using tactics like serving an amuse bouche, pushing platters of many different items, and being generous with samplers of dishes that are still being developed to get feedback. Most ingredients are often the same as those in familiar local dishes, so prices can be kept more or less identical. The impression of modern Indian food being fancy then, comes from the other trappings of flatware, service and decor, which can be upscaled or downscaled to fit any format. It’s best if the food speaks for itself, but restaurateurs have found that it helps to invest in staff training. At all three places – Masala Library, The Spare Kitchen and Copa – servers came over to explain to us exactly what was going on on our plates.

There are also other reasons why chefs are bullish about the trend. Mumbai diners are becoming more adventurous and willing to experiment, and restaurateurs are figuring out how to provide just enough of a frisson without pushing diners too far out of their comfort zones. (Every new trend always also seems to refer to the old reasons of how we are better travelled, have higher disposable income, a willingness to spend more on food, and access to international ingredients, techniques and food television.) “The correct approach is to maintain the authenticity of the dish rather than confuse the customer, but make it interesting by alternating textures,” says Bakshi. At Ziya, for example, instead of traditional dahi bhalla, they have a dahi bhalla ice cream, which tastes exactly like the North Indian dish of lentil dumplings in yogurt. At The Spare Kitchen, Rakesh Talwar is mainly thrilled to be able to put his own style of modern Indian cuisine across because he is both the chef and the owner. “My most cherished moments are when I see people getting their cameras out [even] before they start eating.”

Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and the restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.

Which part of the cow’s milk we drink doesn’t come from a cow? Could it be the blotting paper, the sodium hydroxide, the borax, the vegetable fat, or all of the above? A few years ago, I was boiling milk at home when it spilt all around the burner with more foam than a Nirma ad. Turns out, I almost drank detergent.

The Consumer Guidance Society of India tells us how to test cow’s milk at home for sodium carbonate, hydrogen peroxide, formalin, urea, pulverised soap, detergents, benzoic and salicylic acid as well for safer-sounding stuff like water, skimmed milk powder, salt, cane sugar, glucose, starch, and buffalo milk. Some of these unwelcome add-ons reduce or delay spoilage by making the milk alkaline, some increase the SNF (Solids Not Fat, including protein, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals – but now synonymous with density) value of the milk making it appear thicker, and some raise the lactometer reading, which has been reduced by the addition of water to milk. Some of these merely reduce the nutritive value of the milk, and some can carry disease (water), while others can damage organs, and are known carcinogens (formaldehyde).

Every few months a new milk adulteration racket is busted somewhere in the city. A couple of years ago, we found out that 65 per cent of the milk in Maharashtra, and that just under half of the milk in Mumbai is tainted. In late October this year, eight people were arrested for selling adulterated milk repackaged in packets of popular brands. The milk was mixed with water that was not fit to drink. Other news stories are even more disgusting. A few weeks ago, the Supreme Court of India encouraged state governments to make the production and marketing of adulterated milk an offence punishable by life imprisonment.

But this sort of adulteration is what happens to the milk after it has left the cow. “There is adulteration at every stage: before milking, during milking, and after milking,” says Anmol Trikannad, founder of Doctor Moo premium organic milk. Because most of the milk in and around Mumbai comes from cooperatives made up of small dairy farmers, it isn’t as easy to control what goes into the cow’s body before it is milked, whether it is poor quality (pesticide- or fertiliser-laden) feed or banned hormones that are said to cause anything from early puberty in girls to breast development in men. A lot of the milking is done by hand and in unhygienic surroundings, which can introduce bacteria and other contaminants to the milk.

Given these circumstances, a few companies have identified a business opportunity, and started offering premium milk to Mumbaiites. They claim to have set up a cleaner milking system, promise that their cows get no hormones or antibiotics, assure us that their milk is free of over 100 contaminants, that their packs are tamper proof and that the milk contains no additives. This milk is also, therefore, pricier at Rs60 to Rs80 a litre (as opposed to about Rs34 a litre for regular Amul milk).

Doctor Moo, set up by Trikannad and Rahul Jain, is the latest of these companies. The founders, who work with select dairy farmers in Maharashtra, say that they’ve taken a back-to-basics approach, with milk production as it was done 35 or 40 years ago, before antibiotics and growth hormones. They call the process “udder to kitchen”. The other two most prominent companies are the two-year-old Pride of Cows by Parag Milk Foods located outside Pune (also known for their other brands Gowardhan and Go), and Sarda Farms, in Nashik, which expanded their distribution network to include Mumbai in October this year.

I picked up my pouches of Doctor Moo during my meeting with Trikannad and Jain, while cold bottles of Sarda and Pride of Cows were delivered to my doorstep at 6.30am. All three companies say that their milk is untouched by human hands, the milking is humane, and the feed for their Holstein Friesian or cross-breed cows is well planned. All three offer milk with a pleasantly creamy fat percentage of 3.5 per cent.

There are differences, of course. Doctor Moo is the only one that’s certified organic by Ecocert. Sarda Farms offers four variants: raw, ready-to-drink pasteurised, skim, and ready-to-drink pasteurised and homogenised (essentially the kind that won’t form malai). Pride of Cows says they “pamper” their cows. “It’s a simple but rarely known fact outside dairy circles that happy cows give better milk,” says Devendra Shah, chairman of Parag Milk Foods. “So we take great pains to ensure that our cows are happier than anyone else’s.” Each cow gets a customised feed, piped music, and medical check-ups before milking.

I did a milk tasting at home with a couple of friends. We drank all three chilled, without adding any sugar, straight out of the packaging. We agreed that Sarda Farms’s milk (we had the pasteurised and homogenised one) had the strongest flavour and the same aroma found typically in Indian milk. (They also have the best packaging, a large glass bottle that makes it look tastier than regular milk.) Pride of Cows’s milk had a nice, mild lactic sweetness, and felt thicker, and more concentrated than regular milk. Doctor Moo had a stronger natural sweetness, which lingered even after I made yoghurt with it. It also had a richer, not unpleasant, mouth-coating effect. (Fodder directly affects the taste of the milk. These companies feed their cows oilseeds, dry grass, greens, and plenty of water, in different ratios. )

Doctor Moo is just a few weeks old, and Sarda Farms started distributing milk in Mumbai only a couple of months ago. But Pride of Cows, which has been around for a little over two years, has seen reasonable success. They started with an initial run of 200 customers, and now have about 10,000 in Mumbai and Pune. According to news reports, Shah expects this number to grow to 20,000 within a year.

The people I spoke with say that this is milk as it should be, as opposed to what it has become. But this also means that milk is going the mineral water way. A mass product that was easily available and taken for granted is now so removed from what it used to be, that we need to pay a premium – double the price – to make sure that we get what we think we are paying for.

India is the world’s largest producer of milk, but we consume all of it, also making us the world’s largest consumer. Demand is growing at twice the rate of supply, which has led to rampant corrupt practices in the supply chain. “You get a little bit of milk in that packet of liquid,” said Trikannad, describing the mass-market milk available in the Indian market today. “You can’t be sure what else is in it.” In my case, not too long ago, it was detergent.

For more info on the milk and how to order it see:
Doctormoo.in
Prideofcows.com
Sardafarms.com

Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and the restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.

Pecorino crème brulee at Le Cirque Signature.

It’s been a year of eating at (almost) every new place in the city, and it’s been the year of swinging between hope and despair for Mumbai’s food scene. Most review meals in the city are underwhelming. The restaurants are still feeling their way around the tough market, figuring out service, and tweaking dishes; consistency is a distant goal. Sadly, 2013 turned out to be the year of me-too menus – it felt like half the new places had in-house versions of the dishes that everyone else was doing, and most often these were soups, salads, sandwiches, flatbreads/pizzas and pastas.

And so, the city still doesn’t have one place that specialises in Andhra food, but in the last year we got several new places that offer Indianised European cuisine. But there was a bright spot in the bleakness every once in a while. Amidst the Caesar salads made with iceberg lettuce and sun-dried tomatoes; neon-green guacamole; under-salted, reconstituted mashed potato; random spheres of liquid from kitchens that had recently discovered sodium alginate; and the deconstructed pani puri, there were a few plates that stood out and that were worth the time and the calories.

Mutton Soup at The Birdsong
Waroda Road, behind American Express Bakery, near Jude Bakery, Bandra (West). Tel: 022 2642 2323.
It was in one of those weeks when the city gets a wash that The Birdsong opened. There was so much rain coming down, Waroda Road looked shiny and scrubbed. If there was a moment to fall in love with this dark brown soul-warming soup, that was it. It’s almost like a light tagine with chickpeas and shredded meat. Even better, the broth is rich in flavour but not fat, which makes it lovely any time of the year. Rs250.

Chicken and Bacon Gyro at Greko
Ground Floor, Gagangiri Building, off Carter Road, Bandra (West). Tel: 98705 05737.
Arguably the most polished takeaway joint on Carter Road extension, Greko has lines outside it mostly for its carefully composed gyros. Their chicken and bacon is a combination that’s hard to beat – it’s an upgrade on the regular chicken gyro because of its bacon bits, so it’s more varied in texture and flavour, but it’s not as daunting as the Athenian which contains both gyro meat and souvlaki. Calibrate the house dressings to your taste (I like extra tahini and hot sauce and less mayo) and you have a gyro that tastes better with every bite. Rs180.

Dum Ka Kheema at Hyderabad Xpress
Lane adjacent to Lotus Petrol Pump, New Link Road, Adarsh Nagar, Andheri (West). Tel: 84199 38333.
There’s plenty of great kheema in this city, so for Hyderabad Xpress to come up with a rendition that would impress an old long-time kheema lover is commendable. Their Hyderabadi-style spiced mince is the black dal of kheema dishes – creamier than any other we’ve had in the city, complex but well balanced, and robust without being too sharp in its spice mix. Rs150 for a half-sized portion, Rs210 for a full-sized portion.

Tomato Cumin Yoghurt Soup at Kombava
37 Waroda Road, off Hill Road, in the lane opposite Mocha Mojo, Bandra (West) Tel: 022 6999 6663.
At first spoonful, I almost dismissed this chilled soup as a salted lassi. But then the fruity tartness of tomato and the earthiness of the cumin started adding layers of flavour, sip by sip. It’s hearty enough to make a substantial snack, but light enough to make an accompaniment to a bigger meal. And just like the mutton soup down the road, this is all-weather appropriate. Rs200.

Pecorino Cheese Crème Brulee at Le Cirque Signature
The Leela, Andheri-Kurla Road, Sahar, Andheri (East). Tel: 022 6691 1234.
This is creme brulee for those who lack a sweet tooth, but need to feed an umami-rich savoury one. Not every thing we ate at Le Cirque Signature was impressive, but if there was one dish that blew our table away, it was this. Rich, eggy custard swirled with salty, aged Italian sheep’s milk cheese, with a glass-like caramelised layer, it came with red onion marmalade and a balsamic reduction. I’d rather have this for dessert than tiramisu. Rs850.

Wild Mushroom Chai at Masala Library By Jiggs Kalra
First International Financial Centre, opposite Sofitel Hotel, Bandra Kurla Complex, Bandra (East). Tel: 022 6642 4142.
Ignore the truffle oil creamer made into powder using food additive maltodextrin (most truffle oil is an artificial abomination to start with), and forget about the teabag with the dehydrated mushrooms, just call for the infusion, in this case a consomme-style mushroom broth, by the kettleful. It’s everything a good consomme should be – crystal clear, with no floating fat, extremely light but still deeply concentrated. Masala Library serves meals that can have you rolling out the door on a heavy belly, but this dish, possibly the lightest on the menu, is among its best. Rs395.

Lime Chicken on the Bone at Open House Cafe and Bar
Shop 445, Amar Kunj, Veer Savarkar Marg, Cadell Road, Shivaji Park, Dadar. Tel: 022 2445 5044.
I’d wager this is among the more interesting chicken dishes in Mumbai. On the menu where it’s listed, a little arrow points to an aside – it says “tangy”. When the dish arrives, it doesn’t look it – the sauce is creamy. But take one lick, and expect to scrunch your nose, pucker your mouth, and make a sour face. It coats soft morsels of poultry with fat, salt and acid, that beautiful combination that is unfailingly delicious. I’d pay for the recipe of the sauce. Rs275.

Green Apple Frozen Yoghurt at Pinkberry
Shops No.1 and 2, Dheeraj Swapna Building, Pali Naka, Bandra (West). Tel: 022 6555 5309.
The salted caramel is a crowd favourite at Pinkberry, but there’s nothing as refreshing as the green apple flavour here. It’s tart and fruity, a little like sour gummies, and it’s versatile enough to take every sort of topping from fruit and cake to granola and honey. But what makes this flavour really special is that you can put some really weird, unintuitive stuff on it, and it still tastes great. I’ve had it with basil and cherry tomatoes and loved it; I’ve had it with Pinkberry’s khatta meetha sev and it tasted like fruit chaat; I’ve tried it with chocolate chips and that worked. Nutella may not be as compatible as the rest, but I’m not going to knock it until I try it. Rs194 for a medium scoop, including toppings.

Chashni Bread at Royal Sindh
Shop No.2, Ground Floor, J. P. Road, near Malvani Kkalwan, Versova, Andheri (West). Tel: 022 6536 6625.
White bread deep fried in ghee, then soaked in sugar syrup – there are so many things that are unhealthy about this traditional Sindhi sweet that there is no way it could taste less than delicious. My grandma called it mitthi dabbal (where dabbal meant dabbal roti, the Sindhi way to describe bread). We’d make a luxury version at home when we had guests over – we soaked the bread in milk before frying it, scented the syrup with saffron and cardamom, and covered the bread with slivers of almonds and pistachios. Few Sindhi homes make it these days, mostly because of the guilt it entails. Treat yourself instead at Royal Sindh, where their version is not as sweet as the original and simplified – it’s fried and just soaked in sugar syrup – for speed and convenience. Take it home though and you can dress it up with ice cream or even peanut butter. Rs40.

Hog in The Bull at The Serpis’ Wild Side Cafe
Opposite St Andrew’s Church, Chimbai, Bandra (West). Tel: 98704 83976.
It’s not like the meat is of great quality or that it’s exquisitely cooked – it’s that this dish is both outrageous in its idea, and outrageous value for money when you’re looking for a slab of tasty, messy meat and fat. As the name suggests, it’s a large envelope made of flattened steak, stuffed with chunks of bacon, ham and melting cheese, on a viscous pool of meat gravy running into buttery mash. Don’t try to finish the Hog in The Bull single handedly, unless you’re prepared to go lie down for a couple of hours after. Rs290.

Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and the restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.

In the last month, I have gotten more than a dozen friends hooked onto something they’d never tasted before. They come over for tea and a snack, and the snack turns out to be hot rajgira rotis with onion-rich Sindhi green chutney or fresh homemade yogurt or sweet mango or lime pickle. Everyone who tries it loves rajgira instantly. This seed is also known as ramdana or amaranth, and rotis made from its dough are nutty like almonds, rich like sesame, earthy like maize, grainy like cornmeal, chewy like tapioca pearls (sabudana) and crunchy like toasted semolina.

My food crazy family is mad about it. We always have thick rajgira chapatis in the freezer at home and we make a batch every three days. Sometimes we mix the flour with jowar or bajra, sometimes with mashed potatoes, sometimes with a little yogurt, and sometimes it’s just plain rajgira, warm water and salt. The lightly salted dough can be spiced with pepper and jeera, or ajwain and haldi, or chaat masala, or kasuri methi or, like Sindhi koki, with onions, green chillies, dried pomegranate seeds and coriander leaves. Growing up, I looked forward to what Sindhis call gyaaras, and Hindus call Badi Ekadashi only because of the feasting associated with the fast. My mom would make a deeply peppery broth of boiled potato, baby brinjal and lotus stem, and serve it with doda (a thick roti) or puris with rajgira flour.

In Mumbai rajgira is most popular with fasting Maharashtrians. It isn’t really a grassy cereal, but a seed that behaves like one; it can be used to make flour and dough and is a great substitute for wheat and rice (try making kheer with it). Which is why you’ll find rajgira puris and thalipeeth under the faraal (because grains are eschewed during fasts) section of menus at places like Panshikar, Aaswad, and New Sardar.

Its leaves are more ubiquitous in our markets and our meals – we call them chauli bhaji. And more often than not, we eat the seeds popped, like nano-popcorn, during Sankranti and Janmashtami in Styrofoam-light chikki or ladoo form. But more of us need to start eating rajgira regularly, in more forms cooked in different ways, and not only because it’s so damn delicious. This is not just any seed, it’s as much of a superfood as the recently faddy quinoa. Rajgira is as ancient – it’s been around for 8,000 years – and it finds its origins, like quinoa, in the American tropics (it was an Aztec staple).

Its English name is said to be a combination of amar + anth meaning “one without end” or immortal or deathless, in both ancient Greek and Sanskrit. Protein-wise it’s comparable to quinoa, but it has more calcium, iron, magnesium and potassium, making it a powerhouse of nutrition. For those who care, it’s entirely gluten free. And even though recently opened restaurants prefer to serve quinoa salad and quinoa upma, rajgira is way more versatile. It can be used in sweet and savoury dishes, and is amenable to all sorts of cooking methods such as frying, roasting, baking, boiling, steaming (rajgira idlis are delicious.) Tarla Dalal’s website offers 39 recipes with the flour, including coconut cookies, basundi, and mini rajgira pizzas.

Unlike pricey imported packaged superfoods, rajgira flour and popped rajgira are available at most large kirana stores, and even at the smaller ones in the older parts of the city like CP Tank, often at a fraction of the price. Even if I ignore the lower price, and don’t care about the easy access, the real reason why I love rajgira is because all that buttery, crunchy, nuttiness tastes like anything but health food.

WHERE TO TRY RAJGIRA
Chiwda
At the Kalbadevi outpost of Desai Bhaishankar Gaurishankar, rajgira’s popped grains are roasted with potato, sesame and peanuts in a sweet-spicy masala. The Kandivali one makes the chiwda on order, sweet, spicy, or both, but always with dry fruits and nuts. Both make a great afternoon snack by themselves, but they’re endlessly adaptable – add yogurt, or chopped onions, tomatoes and chutneys for a (seemingly) healthy chaat. Desai Bhaishankar Gaurishankar, 17 Raj Heights, MG Road, Kandivali (West). Tel: 022 2808 9033 / 98208 37108. Rs340 for a kilo; Desai Bhaishankar Gaurishankar MH Shop 174 and 176, opposite Cotton Exchange, Kalbadevi. Tel: 022 6733 8035. Rs280 for a kilo.

Puri
What’s better than aamras-puri or shrikhand-puri? Aamras or shrikhand with rajgira puri. Almost every place that serves Maharashtrian food will have rajgira puris during Navratri and the mango season, but there are a few you can go to year round for this treat. Eating hot, salty, grainy puris with chilled sweet aamras is a special kind of pleasure. At other times, try these puris with the fiery, tangy gravied potato bhaji you get when you order puri-bhaji. Panshikar, Kadamgiri Complex, Hanuman Road, Vile Parle (East). Tel: 022 6675 7869. Also at Mohan Building, JSS Road, Girgaum. Tel: 022 2385 5723. Available on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Rs60 per plate. Khichdi Samrat 44/46 V.P. Road, CP Tank, Girgaum. Tel: 022 2242 0344. Rs45 per plate.

Chikki
Popped rajgira seeds are mixed with jaggery or sugar and rolled and pressed into flat thick chikki, golf-ball sized spheres, and disc-shaped biscuits. Put them in a bowl of cold or warm milk and stir, and you have lightly sweet instant cereal. National Chikki, NSS Road, Asalpha, Ghatkopar (West). Tel: 022 2510 8651. Rs26 for 90gm; Janata Chikki Shop, 250 Hendre Building, V.P. Road, Prarthana Samaj. Tel: 022 2387 0267. Rs22 for 100gm.

WHERE TO BUY RAJGIRA
Flour
Most traditional grocery or kirana stores keep rajgira flour. At New Thakkar Stores, the seeds are ground either coarsely for sheera, or finely for puris and rotis. New Thakkar Stores, 20 Nanubhai Desai Road, at the junction of First Carpenter Road, near Kabutarkhana, CP Tank. Tel: 022 2386 3245. Rs140 per kilo. Shah Raga Ladha 34/40 Khetwadi, near Madhavbaug Temple, Nanubhai Desai Road, CP Tank. Tel: 022 2381 1789. Rs140 a kilo.

Popped
My favourite peanut shop also stocks plain popped (or puffed) rajgira. I love it toasted with chaat masala, as chaat, in kheer, in raita, or as a crumb coating on deep-fried foods. Panalal Hiralal Gupta Peanuts, Near Shop No.11, Shalimar Building, Lala Nigam Road, Colaba. Tel: 98195 89499. Rs32 for 100gm.

Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and the restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.

Photo: Sohrab Nicholson.

Mumbai’s a good city for street food fiends like me. I have a favourite sandwichwala; I’ve been going to the same spots for my pani puri fix for decades; and I’m devoted to the tangy taste of ferment in a good street-side dosa. Do I go to these places because they are clean? Not quite. I follow flavour first and choose to ignore most things unless they make me retch. Open drains, grimy work surfaces, water of suspect origin in our favourite green chutney, scrap paper as an eating vessel – these are intrinsic to this city’s street food culture. Millions of people eat off the street, and I’d like to believe that our immunity is better for it. I have seen rats scuttle across counters at both fancy restaurants and kathi roll stalls, often after I have finished my meals there. Poor hygiene is a Mumbai problem and it permeates everything.

Over the last few years, the government has been trying to implement clearer and better food safety standards through regulations and laws. The Food Safety Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) was set up in 2006 under the Food Safety and Standards Act (FSSA). The Act was enforced on August 5, 2011, and the deadline to implement it (after many extensions) was earlier this week on February 4. All food business operators (FBOs) across the country were supposed to register and obtain a licence under the Act by this date. A couple of weeks ago, Maharashtra’s Food and Drug Administration commissioner Mahesh Zagade told the newspaper DNA that “February 4 is the last date set by the central government to obtain licences or registration by the FBOs [food business operators], failing which they will be prosecuted under the law.” On Tuesday, we found out that this wasn’t set in stone – the deadline has been extended by another six months.

I have serious reservations about it being implemented then, or even a year later. The regulations stipulated under the Act sound utopian if not utterly ridiculous.

The Act demands that all food businesses, whether restaurants in hotels, slaughterhouses, or itinerant hawkers, follow some basic hygiene regulations. The 43 points covered in Section 4 under sanitation say, among other things, that the surroundings should be free from filth and free from insects, that FBOs should provide potable water, that food handlers should wash their hands with soap or detergent and water before handling food, and that body parts must not be scratched. Hawkers should make sure that the work surface of their vending carts is protected from the sun, wind and dust. The location of the unit should not block traffic or pedestrians. Utensils should be rinsed and scrubbed with detergent and rinsed again under running water. Basic hygiene regulations anywhere else, yes, but not quite basic in Mumbai.

The DNA story points out that Mumbai has over 1,00,000 FBOs ranging from top-end restaurants to roadside vendors, and include manufacturers and sellers of packaged food products or raw materials such as dealers of milk, dairy products, meat and oil. The regulations apply to everyone, including “petty food manufacturers”, which, according to the Act include makers or sellers of food, hawkers, itinerant manufacturers which includes vendors, temporary stall holders, and distributors of food in any religious or social gathering with an annual turnover of less than Rs12 lakh. These are our sandwichwalas, vada pao walas, bhelwalas, kharvas sellers, khichiya papadwalas, kebab stalls, lassi stands, peanut vendors, and so on. The Act warns us that street vendors who don’t comply with these rules will lose their licence and are likely to incur hefty fines and penal action.

I’d like to see even one street food hawker manage to pull off just ten of these 43 requirements.

Then there are the packaging regulations. I spoke with people who sell unbranded packaged foods on the streets, such as buddhi ka baal, or chana jor garam and they were not clear if the packaging regulations of the Act apply to their products. These regulations stipulate that all pre-packed food must have a label that specifies (among other things) the name of the food, the list of ingredients, and nutritional information. It would require a massive change in their largely unorganised packing system, one that will take considerable time and effort.

There are some attainable goals, such as food handlers wearing headgear and keeping their mouths covered; making sure that equipment doesn’t have mould or fungus; and ensuring that insecticides and disinfectants are stored separately. All the regulations are very close to the ones listed in international food safety systems such as HACCP. However, many of the rules laid down are not, and should not be, the sole responsibility of the business owners, but instead should largely be taken care of by the city’s civic authority, the BMC.

The intentions behind the Act are well meaning – given our city’s abysmal hygiene conditions, we do need clearer science-based standards for food safety. It demands attention to honesty, hygiene, and fair practices, and it clears the confusion caused by multiple acts. This comprehensive, single point of reference Act is meant to override other food-related laws and repeal at least eight which were in operation until this Act was enforced. These laws include The Prevention of Food Adulteration Act, 1954; The Essential Commodities Act, 1955; and The Milk and Milk Product Order, 1992. Eventually it plans to ensure that regulations governing the Indian food industry are as per international standards. It will also be the only Act applicable to food across the country.

On the evening of February 4, before the extension was announced, I asked several street food hawkers, both licenced and unlicenced, across various markets in the city about how prepared they are for the FSSA, considering the deadline had (then) ostensibly passed. The general consensus, among those who were aware of the Act, was that while we are bound and frustrated by archaic laws, even this relatively new one seems to lack a sense of reality, context and perspective.

At a large 40-year-old kirana store that also sells fresh idli batter, the employees were livid. “I have to label all loose goods,” said the owner. “This is clearly a way to make sure that only multinationals survive and local small businesses are wiped out.” Turns out that the theory is not his alone.

A singh-channa stall owner with a small but established and licenced streetside shop said that people buy loose peanuts from him, which he then heat seals in clear plastic bags just before handing them over. He has no idea how he is expected to work in the packaging rules for this kind of business, but he’s not going to worry too much. “This has been going on for over a year,” he said. “They came to this street and handed out application forms to all the vendors. It eventually will all come to handing out more bribes to more officers, that’s all.”

A vendor who was vigorously tossing together Chinese bhel made up of florid Szechuan sauce, cabbage, bright yellow noodles, and macaroni tried to sell me a plate until I asked him about his FSSA registration. “Would I be doing this if I was educated enough to understand laws?” he asked before brushing me off. My panipuriwala who has had a thela for over two decades said that if the law is implemented as planned, more than half of Mumbai’s street food vendors will have to shut shop. Over fifty per cent of the vendors I spoke with had no idea that there was such an Act, despite the government conducting a fairly extensive campaign across print and radio.

The people who were somewhat aware agreed that implementation of this Act will either keep getting postponed, or it will be implemented and lose its teeth. In the off chance that it is eventually effectively implemented, Mumbai’s street food scene will change, because all the smaller vendors would prefer to close down their businesses and change their professions instead of complying or paying the price for not. The ones who survive will have to increase their prices to incorporate the added cost of bribes. The most optimistic view was that in five years the city will have food courts set up by the government, much like Singapore, where sanitation and facilities are taken care of for licenced vendors. I’m curious to see how it plays out.

Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and the restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.

Fried sweet ravioli at Serafina.

You can go a month or more of ordering a different dessert and still not get bored with the options. You only need to scan social media feeds and food listings to know where to chase a car selling cookies; to plan a picnic at a farmer’s market piled with fresh fruit popsicles and Old Monk salted caramel sauce; or to chart a dessert trail in Bandra, stopping for porcini ice cream at Salt Water Cafe, for pizookie (a pizza-sized topped cookie) at Polpo, for paan kulfi at Pali Bhavan, and for passion fruit macaroons at Le15. Alternatively, you can schedule a quick after-dinner walk from Fort to Colaba, for mulberry baked yoghurt at The Pantry, for raspberry caramel pralines at La Folie, for white chocolate and pistachio ravioli at Cheval, and for Baileys cheesecake with espresso shortbread and Jameson ice cream at Ellipsis.

Last year, around this time I was planning a trail for my dad – a man who would gladly eat dessert for dinner every time – and I had only a fraction of the options I have now. Dessert wise, it’s been a good year even for people who are not sweet of tooth (or like me who need to neutralise their palate with something salty after dessert), because a few chefs in the city are starting to treat the sugar in sweets the way they treat salt in savoury dishes: as an element that binds other flavours together without dominating them. Some folks are even salting their desserts to temper the sweetness.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it’s a Renaissance of the last course yet. (It’s a hungry market for certain. A new pastry shop seems to open every month, but most of them are merely mediocre.) However, given how restaurateurs and chefs handling new openings have been so risk-averse lately, the fledgling spirit of innovation in desserts has been relatively heartening and perhaps even somewhat exciting. A few restaurant pastry chefs, home bakers, and speciality shop owners are taking wilder chances. For those of us weary of standard chocolate desserts, we get it now in astonishing textures like gel and dust, or as bars spiked with flavours such as Kerala black pepper and nimboo sherbat. Ice cream has become a vehicle of creative expression, laced with beer or imbued with white chocolate and sour cherries. While most of the fun is being had in Western-style desserts, a couple of restaurants have even been playing around with the textures and presentations of local favourites like jalebi and kulfi.

“When I came back to India four years ago, it felt like every restaurant had the same pastry chef,” says Pooja Dhingra, owner of Le15 Patisserie. “Everyone had the same five desserts – blueberry cheesecake, chocolate fondant, etc…now there are so many independent pastry shops in the city, you have to do something to stand out. Lately, customers placing orders for cakes ask me, ‘Can you make something that no one has tried before?’”

Deconstructed apple crumble at Long & Short.

Desserts are also easier to fool around with because they’re not the main event of the meal, but an additional indulgence. On the one hand, diners tend to have a greater expectation of satisfaction from their main course, or have presumptions about what a truffle tagliatelle or a tikka masala should taste like. On the other hand, they need to be convinced, after they’re almost done with their meal and close to being stuffed, that dessert is exciting enough to linger over or is worth the calories. Classics are now cliches. “Even the West has moved away from classic desserts,” says Kelvin Cheung, chef at Ellipsis, where in the last few months people have been dropping in after meals specifically to have dessert. “Head chefs are becoming more involved in pastry. We’re not there yet [in Mumbai], but we’re slowly changing as well.” A little over a year ago, Cheung had introduced a bacon and corn flan with chocolate mousse on his dessert list, but it didn’t take off. “If I bring it back now, I feel like it would sell,” he says.

In many ways, chasing perfection in the classics is also a losing game in our city. We just don’t have the quality of ingredients (flour, butter, milk, chocolate) or the climate (low levels of heat and humidity) for good pastry, even if we have the skill. (Dhingra said that she was the only Indian student at Le Cordon Blue Paris in 2007, but now every class has about five Indian students keen on perfecting pastry.) Also recently, importing ingredients has become tougher owing to new laws and regulations, so even if the posher restaurants had access to French butter or Italian flour, they’ve had to find other means and routes for sourcing them or to adjust their expectations. A paucity of imported mascarpone has meant that Serafina’s bestselling signature tiramisu has been edited off the menu. It will be replaced by the more easily managed fried sweet ravioli in a couple of weeks, says Harjeet Singh, general manager of umbrella company Global Kitchens. “We just didn’t get the same texture with Indian mascarpone,” says Singh. “But people are becoming more adventurous, so I won’t be surprised if our ravioli joins our panna cotta and tiramisu in sales.”

It’s easier to put a spin on a classic and not have well-travelled diners complain, for example, about how the New York-style cheesecake at a Bandra restaurant is not up to scratch compared to the one they had in Times Square. The trick is to have something a little familiar as a point of reference and then to throw in surprise flavours and textures. It works as well for a paan macaroon as it does for a ghewar cheesecake. Zorawar Kalra – whose Masala Library by Jiggs Kalra is one of the handful of restaurants that plays around with Indian desserts in the city – says that their bestselling jalebi caviar with rabdi keeps flavour in focus to provide familiarity. Thus the jalebi tastes like jalebi even if it looks like caviar and has an amplified crunch.

MasterChef, macaroon-making classes, and increased travel by Indians have all played a role in convincing us to try what at first sounds weird. “When I first started serving chocolate ganache with beer ice cream, or beetroot red velvet cake with orange-ginger ice cream, customers would ask me, ‘Are you sure we’ll like it?’”, says Manoj Shetty, head chef of The Tasting Room. “I’d tell them, ‘If you don’t, it’s on me’.” These days, diners ask for scoops of the ice cream by itself, and ten beet cakes get sold per day, no convincing or comp-ing required.

TREATS FOR AN ADVENTUROUS TOOTH
Beetroot Cupcake with Orange-Ginger Ice Cream at The Tasting Room
First Floor, Good Earth, Raghuvanshi Mills Compound, Senapati Bapat Marg, Lower Parel. Tel: 022 6161 1346.
A naturally coloured red velvet cake (using beetroot juice), paired with house-made spicy orange and ginger ice cream. Rs320.

Chocolate Textures at Ellipsis
Amarchand Mansion, Madame Cama Road, Colaba. Tel: 022 6621 3333.
Super dark chocolate, dark chocolate, milk chocolate, white chocolate, salt toffee, and chocolate pate sucree (sweet pastry), each in a different texture, thanks to a little magic from agar agar. Rs550.

Ghewar Cheesecake at Masala Library By Jiggs Kalra
Ground Floor, First International Financial Centre, opposite Sofitel, Bandra Kurla Complex, Bandra (East). Tel: 022 6642 4142.
Cheesecake layered on a porous, crunchy ghewar crust, served on a bed of rabdi. Rs450.

Fried Sweet Ravioli at Serafina
Level Three, Palladium, High Street Phoenix, Senapati Bapat Marg, Lower Parel. Tel: 022 4023 7711.
Fried pasta pockets filled with rum-soaked raisins, cream cheese and caramel sauce. Price yet to be fixed.

Sweet Memories of India at Choko La
G-10 and G-11, Ground Floor, Link Corner Mall, off Linking Road, Bandra (West). Tel: 022 6534 0374. Also at the Domestic Airport, near Gate No.6, Vile Parle (East).
In this box of two bars, one slab of chocolate has candied orange peel and Kerala black pepper, and the other has fennel seeds, rock sugar and cardamom. Rs1,500.

The Candy Cake at La Folie
16, Commerce House, Rope Walk Lane, next to Trishna restaurant, Kala Ghoda, Fort. Tel: 022 2262 2686.
A layered cake of chocolate biscuit, buttercream, mousse, mint marshmallow cream, ganache and glaze designed to evoke childhood memories. Rs215.

Porcini Ice Cream at Salt Water Cafe
87 Chapel Road, Rose Minar Annexe, next to Mount Carmel Church, Bandra (West). Tel: 2643 4441.
Dehydrated porcini mushrooms are steeped in milk, which is then used to make the crème anglaise custard that becomes the ice cream. Toasted porcini dust is stirred in for some serious umami flavour in this savoury-sweet treat. Rs120.

Deconstructed Apple Crumble at Long & Short
InterContinental Hotel Marine Drive, Marine Drive. Tel: 022 3987 9999.
Near translucent slices of Granny Smith apple are alternated with dulce de leche and candied walnuts flavoured with cinnamon. Rs385.

Half-and-Half Macaroons at Le 15 Patisserie
Good Earth, Raghuvanshi Mills Compound, Senapati Bapat Marg, Lower Parel. Tel: 022 6513 3212. Palladium, First Floor, High Street Phoenix, Senapati Bapat Marg, Lower Parel. Tel: 022 6561 8532. Ground Floor, Siffin Building, Dr Ambedkar Marg, Pali Hill, Bandra (West). Tel: 022 6513 3211.
These macaroons not only have two shells of different flavours, but also two different fillings. Available in rose and chocolate, and pistachio and chocolate. Rs65 per piece.

Indian Chocolates at Filter
Behind Rhythm House, Fort. Tel: 022 2288 7070.
Bars flavoured with local nimboo sherbat, Gujarati aamras, Madras kapi, Indian paan, Parsi ceremonial rose, and Kerala dalchini. Rs135 per bar.

Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and the restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.

Parathas at Nawab Seekh Corner.

Bade Miyan now looks boring, Ayub’s is just average in comparison, and Noorani…well, never mind. In the last week, the places I’ve eaten at, the dishes I have tried, and the people I have shared tables with – at hours when most people sleep – prove that we haven’t even scratched the surface of what and how Mumbai eats at night. Forget khau gallis and after-party munchies. Don’t pay any attention to the boiled egg sellers standing outside country liquor bars. And let’s not even bother with hotel coffee shops. Try instead going to a spot outside a mojri stall two lanes from Santa Cruz station where a bhurji paowala starts business every day at 10pm, and hopes that the authorities only have a plate or two and let him stay open until 5am. Or to a restaurant in town that is over a century old, stays open for 24 hours, and serves everything from chicken tikka to cubed processed cheese in three gravies, served in the sections of a moulded thali and garnished with grated beet.

About a week ago, I was at The Light of Asia (Kothari Mansion, Mint Road, behind GPO, Fort. Tel: 022 2261 3572), wondering if the place still served kheema pao and chai to advertising folks who walked out of their offices starving at 3am. (The restaurant is more than a century old, but I have no idea if it has any connection to the book or poem or film, because the guy who named the place is long gone.) Not too long ago, I worked at an agency in Nariman Point, and I’d visited The Light Of Asia a couple of times because nothing tastes better than spicy mince with sticky milky tea after an 18-hour work day.

They don’t serve kheema pao any more. But they offer over 200 items on their menu – from mosambi juice to chicken tikka fried rice – at expensive rates for the sort of place it is, with the night menu even more ridiculously priced. However I can’t say that the menu lacks creativity. The “la deluxe” dishes include everything from paya to processed cheese – three ways (in a red gravy, a brown gravy, and a yellow gravy), an item that set me back a steep Rs320. The paneer section is called “doodh ki leher”, the seafood list is titled “samundar ke moti”, but I think calling the brain dishes “khopdi ka khazana” is a bit much. It’s all built for iron-clad bellies. The manager told me that they’re open 24 hours, even if the shutter is down for a couple of hours, between 2.30am and 5am. In the wee hours, you find night-shift workers and partygoers from LGBT bar Let’s Scream down the road digging into the grub, while a beautiful and very vocal grey tabby walks around (and over) the benches with more confidence than the servers do.

While I was chatting with the manager, a couple of local political party leaders sitting at a table overheard us, and started volunteering information for my interview. They corrected me if I called the city Bombay or Bambai, gave me their cards, and asked me to go try “haddiwala Mughlai chilly” at Cafe Zeenat (Dalal Estate, opposite Sadar Hotel, Foras Road. Tel: 022 2307 9736). So there I was the very next afternoon, watching whom the owner Afzalbhai Ali Mohammed calls “doh number ke aadmi”, the majority of his clientele, while they scarfed down kheema pao, eggs and chai. This place is on the edge of Kamathipura, and it is no restaurant for women, especially not after dark. “What other sort of people do you think eat here at 2.30am?” asked Mohammed. “All the girls from dance bars live around this area. We don’t allow them here, but their ‘friends’ come to eat, and then order delivery parcels to be sent to the girls’ rooms,” he said.

At one point a gaggle of little girls, none of them over the age of ten, ran up to the counter from the street, and said “aath chai chahiye, parcel”. Eight cuttings in knotted tiny plastic bags were duly provided. I ignored the plateful of shakarparas and the jarful of gulab jamuns at the counter, and asked, in the spirit of adventure, for a spoonful of the Mughlai chilly. It’s a Zeenat creation – their version of greasy Mughlai sauce, based in caramelised onions and garam masala, melded with cornflour, and spiked with soy sauce, Chinese chilli sauce and MSG, then cooked some more with pieces of meat on the bone. A serving is for Rs120. I’m not going back for it.

What I would recommend is Tukaram Kunwal Namdeo’s bhurji pao, on Second Hasnabad Lane in Santa Cruz West. He’s been doing business there for 40 years, and his thela has grown into a large stainless steel-clad mobile stall that looks almost like a station in a professional kitchen. A hill of bhurji is always going on the tawa, and it’s loaded with freshly chopped tomatoes, onions and tons of not-too-spicy rings of green chillies. With it, there is laadi pao that gets a quick buttery sear on the same griddle. His friend Kiran Jaikar, who owns a mojri stall (“I supply chappals to all of Bollywood. (Designer) Manish Malhotra comes to my shop”) alongside that shuts just as Namdeo starts, told me that people line up in BMWs and Mercedes cars to sample the fare. “For a dish that’s less than Rs100, people give him Rs500 and go,” said Jaikar. That sounds like an exaggeration, but I remember that one of the guys at The Light of Asia told me that sometimes, at 4am, you can see a line of people from vegetarian communities waiting for some anda pao at Namdeo’s.

There would be no stealth required if they trekked to Adarsh Annapoorna (Ramwadi, Kalbadevi Road, Kalbadevi. Tel: 022 2207 5757) instead. This vegetarian restaurant is attached to Hotel Adarsh in Ramwadi and so it is well within the law to stay open as long as it likes. “Like the Taj has a 24-hour coffee shop Shamiana, this is for our hotel,” said owner Manish Purohit. He says he was inspired to set it up after the 1992 riots when he saw that people who took refuge in the hotel needed to eat. “The main purpose is to serve in-house guests, but outsiders are also welcome.” If the main door is shut, the side door is open, and they encourage parcels and deliveries. Folks hankering for a dal baati churma, or mushroom Manchurian, or sarson ka saag and makki ki roti at 3.30am can satisfy their cravings here – Rajasthani, Chinese, and Punjabi food are available at that hour, but not sandwiches and snacks, because they don’t want people to linger and do “TP-giri”. The sarson ka saag, full-fat and very green, was pretty decent. As was the ghee-soaked churma.

My best late-night meal yet was with Roycin D’Souza, he of bacon cake fame. D’Souza was the one who planted the idea of checking out little-known late-night eating joints in my mind, a few weeks ago. He took me to Nawab Seekh Corner in Kurla (lane adjacent to Delhi Zaika and Kalpana Cinema, off LBS Road, Kurla. Also at Mohammed Ali Road). They serve but one dish – a mutton seekh kebab that is so fresh, you have to pass by the curtained-off kitchen that barely conceals butchers working on whole carcasses. The seekh comes with a rib-sticking fried puri-paratha hybrid, a whole joodi of mint, a heap of cut limbu, and a saucerful of runny dark green chutney over raw onion rings. The fat has been cut away from the meat, so four seekhs may not do you in, but one paratha will.

Each component is made by specialists. Around the corner, on LBS Road, behind a red telephone box, two paratha handlers roll out discs from a sack-sized mound of dough and barely cook it on a thick iron tava over a charcoal sigdi. Tall stacks of these, almost two feet high, come to the open kitchen alongside the restaurant, where they get poked to prevent them from puffing up, and then get fried a la minute in a kadhai that could accommodate three watermelons without any crowding. A separate team prepares the seekhs on a narrow grill that is over a metre long. Another dedicated team manages the takeaway stall near the entrance of the lane. Still, a single cylinder of moist, medium-rare meat costs only Rs14. We sat in the al fresco balcony area in the upstairs section of the restaurant that’s altogether frayed-looking and spent about an hour eating several plates of kebabs. D’Souza told me that this meal is his comfort food; he’s there every week. Sarvi is always fun and right up there in the seekh stars list, but now I also wish I lived closer to Kurla’s Nawab Seekh Corner.

Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and the restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.

Most of the city’s Parsi food-serving Irani restaurants are around Fort, and fried foods and sweets shop Camy Wafers has a sound and solid reputation among them for the quality of their salli, the well-loved, deep-fried and salted juliennes of potato often used in Parsi food. Indeed, Britannia’s 91-year-old Boman Rashid Kohinoor Irani said he only buys his stock for the 91-year-old restaurant’s salli boti, salli kheema, and salli chicken from the Camy Wafers shop on Colaba Causeway. When I visited this outlet, the manager briefly paused in the middle of their frenetic mid-afternoon business to inform me that that they sell about ten kilos of salli a day on average, not counting festive occasions. The biggest buyers are Irani joints and Parsi restaurants, as well as Parsi and Sindhi folk who come from nearby Colaba and from as far as Hughes Road.

But that’s nothing compared to how much salli flies off the shelves at Metro Wafers on Mathar Pakadi Road in Mazgaon. This shop, which is about a third the size of Colaba’s Camy, sells 60 to 70 kilos of the minuscule potato sticks a day, all fried daily in the kitchen at the back. Owner Murtuza Ujjainwala took me to the back of his shop where a gleaming aluminum kadhai (in which a full-grown man could lay down very comfortably) is perched on a waist-high tandoor-like stove. “Walk carefully and slowly,” he said to me as we moved past sacks of potatoes, the kind called “wafer batata” in Vashi vegetable market, on the oil-slicked floor of the passageway. Every morning a few boys gather at the back of the shop to peel the spuds and then push them, lengthwise, into crude slicing and cutting machines. Depending on the blade, the potatoes get shaped into translucent slices for wafers, or into thin or thick potato sticks for two kinds of salli. These fall below into a vat of water and get washed to rid them of excess starch. They’re then squeezed dry in a drum that works much like the spin cycle in a washing machine before being fried in the massive kadhai.

“Of course the oil splashes back at you,” said Ujjainwala when I asked him about how the salli is salted. It seems unintuitive and downright dangerous, but Metro’s boys toss arcs of very concentrated brine into the bubbling oil once the salli has begun to crisp. This ensures that the salt is evenly distributed in the chips and doesn’t sit only on their surface. “If I put salt on top, there will be salt deposits on the inside of the packet, and when you put the salli in your mouth, the first thing you will taste is an unpleasant hit of salt,” said Ujjainwala. To minimise accidents from the splashing, Metro’s boys put only 85 litres of oil in the kadhai at a time when in fact it can hold 180. All of the day’s salli is fried by 10am, and you can tell from the space it gets on the shop’s shelves that it is their highest seller. Parsis prefer the thin variety.

Metro was recommended to me by archaeologist and Parsi food caterer Kurush Dalal who regularly buys his stock from them. I went to Dalal to solve the mystery behind the origins of salli in Parsi food. A few years ago, I had spent a few weeks in Iran, where, leave aside salli, potatoes barely figure in the cuisine and meals are typically a spread of beautiful leaf-thin “berg” kebabs; barberry-, saffron- and fried onion-laden meaty “polo” (a biryani-like rice dish, related to pilaf and pulao); “fesenjan” or duck cooked in a nutty-tart sauce of walnuts and pomegranate molasses, and the fizzy minty yoghurt drink “ayran”. The Persian influence in Indian Parsi food is evident in the community’s love for meat and their propensity to combine it with dried fruit, as in jardalu salli boti. But the Parsi proclivity to to put these crisp fried potato sticks on their gravied dishes seems to be entirely their own. (We Sindhis eat salli as a snack, sprinkled with red chilles and salt, with our tea, while Maharashtrians make a sweet-salty and very delicious chiwda with them.)

Salli par eeda.

Dalal offered the most plausible explanation for the Parsi love of salli. Potatoes, among other produce, were brought to western India by the Portuguese (via Spanish explorers who brought them from the Andes in South America, where the potato originates) in the early 16th century. The Parsis, being an adaptable and integrative community, adopted some Portuguese ways. Vinegar (“sarka”, part of Parsi pork vindaloo, and many other dishes) and potatoes are Portuguese influences on Parsi food, and have nothing to do with Persia.

It’s still hard to say which ingenious Parsi cook decided to put salli over spicy mince, over chicken and apricots, and under eggs (salli par eeda), but Dalal points out that its explosive crunchiness apart, this textural joy also has a very practical use – during bhonu (meals), it prevents the gravy of the dishes it covers from running all over the patra (banana leaf). Dalal says that to be most effective, salli has to be cut just right – too long and it starts curling. It also needs to be fried just right – the best salli has a definitive snap, and is also very pale, cream in colour, with a flush of gold. Before mandolines and potato-cutting machines came along, all salli was manually made, and it was all tediously hand-cut jaadi (fat) salli. Dalal has memories of going to Golden Wafers on Grant Road as a kid and watching the workers hand squeeze brined potato sticks in a cheesecloth that had gone grey from all that starch.

“Parsi food originates in India, and for Parsis taste is paramount,” said Shehriar Khosravi, owner of Cafe Military, where the kheema salli is among our favourites in the city. “Somebody at some point must have noticed that salli tastes good, and decided to eat it. It’s like potatoes in other [communities'] foods. It’s not that the batata vada originated in Shivaji Maharaj’s era, or that potatoes grew in south India to have someone put it in masala dosa.” Food writer Vikram Doctor has a well-reasoned theory about how salli became a substantial garnish for Parsi food in India. “It’s quite likely an alternative for birista and provides textural contrast,” he said. Birista is the name for deeply caramelised and slightly crisp, long slivers of onions used in Middle Eastern and Indian dishes such as biryanis, Turkish yoghurt-sauced pasta dishes, and Irani “polo”. Salli is a worthy replacement. (Try it on sambar, in Sindhi kadhi, on palak raita, on nalli nihari, even on alu muttar. It makes everything more fun.)

Perhaps the most surprising and verifiable piece of information I learned about salli came up during my conversation with Ujjainwala. He said that ten kilos of potatoes yields only three kilos of salli, and soaks up one and a half litres of oil in the process. So wait, salli is half massively dehydrated potato and half oil? “Haan”, he said. “Why else do you think potatoes are about Rs10 for a kilo and salli is typically for Rs250?”

Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and the restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.

Owner Naeem Jaffer of Jaffson Pickles and Masalas.

Waroda Road has had a lot of attention in the last year thanks to its slew of cool new openings. But after a smoothie at Kombava or a schnitzel at Imbiss, I sought out greater fascinations and more fun farther east, inside the decidedly un-tony Bazaar Road. This, the oldest street in Bandra (once called Rua do Bazar by the Portuguese), is barely wide enough to accommodate a bullock cart, but in the 300-odd metres from the junction of Chapel Road, Bazaar Road, and Waroda Road, to the junction where the historic covered Town Market with its butchers and well-fed cats and the locally famous all-vegetarian kirana Kalidas Vishram stand, there are more than a dozen reasons to stop and eat, or shop for food.

It’s loud and busy on the street, but if you look up at the old cottages of this gaothan, which pre-reclamation had the sea for a backyard, you see pretty low-slung roofs with red tiles trimmed with fretwork, wrought iron railings, and porches. Under the guise of what the locals call RP (repair permission) many of the cottages are being made into taller buildings of two or three storeys plus terrace, with the highest one rising to seven levels. Yet it’s still a village, the antithesis of Waroda’s hip nowness, home to many communities, including East Indians, Goans, Muslims, Jains, and Hindus, and the food shopping and eating scene represents each one. In the first half of this two-part story, we look at the street’s oldest bakery, a home vinegar brewer, and a caterer who specialises in stuffing a goat with boiled eggs and chicken legs.

Bharat Stores (Vinegar)
That’s exactly what the signboard says. There’s nothing in the avalanche of imported food products that appears to spill from this shop that seems unusual. But among the packets of pasta, bottles of olive oil, juice mixes and candy, are bottles of Bisleri and Thums Up filled with murky orange-brown liquid. Owner Zaheer Abbas brews unfiltered apple cider vinegar at home and claims that people prefer it to store-brought brands. I tasted a few drops – it was pretty good. His grandfather used to make home-brewed sugarcane vinegar and sell it from this spot, and Abbas decided to add apple cider vinegar to the offerings. The sugarcane one tasted a bit artificial to me, so I can’t say if the apple one is the kind you’d drink for better health, but Abbas recommends it as a dressing for salad, in which it should be just fine.
103 Bazaar Road, on the street outside Jaffson Pickle and Masala, Bandra (West). Tel: 98192 03512. Open daily, from 11am to 2pm and from 5pm to 9pm. Rs180 for a litre of unfiltered apple cider vinegar.

D’Costa Bakery
The oldest bakery on the oldest street in Bandra is now owned by Siraj Khan who bought it from the owners the Baretto family. According to Clarence Gomes who edited neighbourhood newspaper Bandra Times the name D’Costa comes from the original owner whose daughter Marie D’Costa inherited the loss-making business from her father after her marriage to Alex Francis Baretto. “Marie Baretto ran the bakery to her last breath,” says Gomes. Go here for a neighbourhood breakfast tradition – gutli pav with maska and chai. D’Costa’s pav has a firm crust with a hollow knock. Warm it, split it, melt a heaped tablespoon of butter on it, dunk it into sweet chai and dig in.
98 Bazaar Road, opposite Shia Masjid, Bandra (West). Tel: 98209 46550. Open daily, from 6am to 11pm. Prices range from Rs2 for a single gutli pav to Rs180 for one kilo of coconut cookies.

Jaffson Pickles and Masalas
Try leaving Jaffsons without the prickle of garam masala in your nostrils. Naeem Jaffer will open jars and ask you to stick your head inside them within minutes of you showing up. The shop may only be 13 years old, but Jaffer has been in business for 28 years. After his family fell upon hard times in the mid-1980s, his mom and brothers took up a spot on the porch of Tony Tailor’s shop (“He was famous for his suits,” says Jaffer. “He made everyone’s wedding suits in Bandra.”) down the street to sell small quantities of homemade mango and lime pickles. Now Jaffer stocks around 20 types of pickles and 43 masala blends, from East Indian bottle masala and pani puri masala to sambhar masala and Sindhi biryani masala. He also supplies his masalas to over a hundred shops in the city, under the brand Jaffson. “Jaffer & Sons was too long, so I shortened it,” he says. Jaffer buys the masalas from Vashi and roasts, grinds and mixes them in house at the back of the shop. The proportions for the blends are all his own. Try this: ask him to do a blind sniffing of any of his masala blends – he promises he’ll be able to identify each one.
103/2 Bazaar Road, Rahat Manzil, next to Shia Masjid, Bandra (West). Tel: 99696 49329. Open Monday to Thursday and Saturday, from 9.30am to 2pm and from 4.30pm to 9pm; Friday, from 9.30am to 1pm and from 4.30pm to 9pm; Sunday, from 9.30am to 2pm. Prices range from Rs30 for 100 grams of Malvani masala to Rs65 for 100 grams of Sindhi biryani masala.

Jeff Caterers
“Lots of people have started Jeff Caterers now,” says Nafisa Zakiuddin Golwala of imitators. “But then anyone can start a business and call themselves Tata or Reliance – that doesn’t make them the real thing, or successful.” Her late husband Zakiuddin Golwala started Jeff in 1950 after he quit school at the age 12 to help his mother set up a food business. The name Jeff was “gifted” to him by Nafisa’s aunt before the couple even knew they might one day be married. The new name changed his fortunes, and until today they are famous for their biryani, their spiral hand-moulded seekh kebabs, their lacy brain cutlets and their whole goat which is stuffed with dried fruits and nuts, boiled eggs, tandoori chicken legs and then blanketed with biryani and chicken kebabs. Matin Khan, the evidently proud cook, says that owners of nearby restaurants order food from Jeff. Supposedly, managers at The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Colaba place orders for their Arab guests who like to stay at the hotel but prefer to eat Jeff’s food. You can pick up kebabs, fried snacks, biryani, and some gravy dishes from the counter on the street, and can order food for house parties from their extensive catering menu.
143A Bazaar Road, Chapel Road junction, Bandra (West). Tel: 98204 02047 /022 2642 1856. Open daily, from 9am to 10.30am. Prices range from Rs20 for 50 grams of minced chicken balls to Rs6,900 for a whole stuffed goat which is enough for 16 people.

Jim-me’s Kitchen
Jim-me Hsuing, the owner of Jim-me’s Kitchen, moved to the city from Kolkata in 1973, operated Chinese Home in Kala Ghoda where Chetana restaurant is today, then conducted business at a restaurant called Rose Garden in Bandra where Salt Water Cafe is today and then moved to this spot on the fringe of Bazaar Road in 1991. The head cook has been working with him for the last 35 years. The food is mostly Hakka and Cantonese and the sort of affordable, familiar, intensely flavoured Indian Chinese and Chinese that tastes even better after a few drinks. Their speciality and bestseller are their stir fried preparations, and the spare ribs JK Style have something of a cult status in the neighbourhood.
12 St Peter’s Road, off Hill Road, Bandra (West). Tel: 91670 09455 /022 6504 8864 /022 2643 6301. Open daily, from 11am to 11.30pm. Prices from Rs100 for a vegetable clear soup to Rs300 for spare ribs JK Style.

Kalidas Vishram
The oldest shop in the neighbourhood, this kirana store was started by a man named Kalidas 115 years ago. Today his great-grandsons Jitesh and Jayesh Thakker man the cash counter and help the staff with everything from stocking to sales. Apart from the kirana staples they sell all sorts of Ayurvedic and herbal powders, idli batter and fresh grated coconut. Their stock is all vegetarian in a meat-loving neighbourhood. “A customer can come and say give us ingredients for half a kilo of cake, or doughnuts, or kalkals, and we will put all the ingredients in the perfect proportion in a bag and give it to them,” says Jayesh Thakkar.
87 Bazaar Road, opposite Shree Laxmi Hotel, next to Town Market, Bandra (West). Tel: 022 2642 2292. Open Monday to Saturday, from 8am to 1pm and from 3.30pm to 9pm; Sunday, closed.

Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and the restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.

Making banana chips at Shree Sai Ram Hot Chips.

Lourdes Fast Food’s Gilroy Nunes was talking to me about the neighbourhood in the back room of Safe Caterers over mutton mince balls when he suddenly stopped, looked outside the window, yelled out to someone and raised his hand. Soon our server joined him and started waving his arms as well. Kimenna “Kim” Godfrey was walking by on the way to work. They called her in. She sat with us, refused to take a bite (she’s given up meat for Lent) and happily shared some details about the locality. This neighbourhood is astoundingly friendly – people let me into their homes, made me mango milkshake, generously gave me their time at pretty much no notice, and introduced me to other shopkeepers and their friends as I walked around.

Godfrey has lived on Bazaar Road all 49 years of her life – because it is a gaothan area, she told me, rampant development has been curtailed. Bazaar Road belongs to Ranwar Village – once known as Ranuar or Ranoar by the Portuguese – which was a pakhadi, or hamlet of farmers and fishermen in fertile Salsette island’s biggest district Bandra. Earlier last week, I’d spoken with Ayaz Basrai of the The Busride design studio who has mapped out the many plots on Bazaar Road as part of The Bandra Project. He spoke to me about how the plot sizes are too small to garner much interest from larger builders, and about how for an area of incredible religious and communal diversity, it is also a deeply unified one. In the second and final part of this two-part story (you can read the first part here) about the food shops and eating places on Bazaar Road, I visit another historic bakery, stop at a couple of places serving East Indian snacks, buy rose cookies, and meet a kulfiwala who rings a bell.

Lourdes Fast Food
The latest offerings from Gilroy and Lourdes Nunes include para or dried mackerel pickle, and it’s already garnered several fans. The oily fish is sun dried for three to four days and then mixed with pickling spices and vinegar. When I visited their stall this time, the Nunes also opened a jar of sweet-spicy prawn balchao and stuck it under my nose. “It’s verrrry tasty!” they said.
111D Bazaar Road, opposite National Bakery, Bandra (West). Tel: 98670 45434. Open Monday to Saturday, from 6pm to 9pm; Sunday, closed. Prices range from Rs12 for a cutlet or a chop to Rs500 for a kilo of curry such as beef ball curry or chicken khuddi. East Indian bottle masala, Rs1,000 per kilo.

Lydia’s
Lydia Fernandes and her husband Anthony set up a table selling East Indian snacks on the bathtub-sized porch of their 100-year-old family cottage a few years ago. But they have been catering East Indian sweets like marzipan and milk cream from their kitchen inside “for donkey’s years”. The couple prefers not to keep track of time, because “now we are old”, said 60-year-old Anthony. The building may have gained a floor or two since he was a boy, but some snacks, like the slim and tall triple decker rainbow sandwiches with red ketchup, green chutney and yellow cheese are utterly nostalgic. Also try the chicken pan rolls and the beef chops. An eight-year-old boy who is a loyal customer recommended them to me and he was spot on. If you want to try East Indian wedding rice with plums, cashews and eggs, they take orders for it – it’s Rs500 for a kilo.
139 Bazaar Road, Bandra (West). Tel: 022 2643 6064. Open daily, from 5pm until stocks run out (typically by 7pm). Prices range from Rs18 for a rainbow sandwich to Rs900 for one kilo of mutton curry.

Mini Crawford Market
The salesladies at perfume and make-up counters at department stores can pick up a few tips from the salesmen at the relatively new Mini Crawford Market, which is known mostly for its imported packaged foods and dried fruit and nuts. So aggressive are they in their charm, it becomes impossible to leave this shop empty handed. They know if you are a new customer, or on your second visit, or a regular, and they work you and the contents of your wallet accordingly, keeping their sales pitch seemingly caual while they get you to taste hazelnuts, sunflower seeds, and try out shoes. Yes, shoes. They’ve bought an entire consignment from a small manufacturer, and so alongside packets of Tang, Toblerone, Pringles and Choco Pie, they have glitzy, somewhat flimsy-looking chappals, sandals and Crocs-inspired sneakers. More importantly, they have a larger wholesale dried fruit and nuts store at the original Crawford Market, from which they supply to retailers within the market, so their stock here is also always fresh. I like their walnuts, hazelnuts, and Iranian pistas (which they import). If you’re even slightly friendly on your first visit, you”ll get a packet of Tang free as a gesture of goodwill.
Shop No.2, opposite Shia Masjid, Bazaar Road, Bandra (West). Tel: 87678 96972. Open Monday to Saturday, from 9am to 10pm; Sunday, from 9am to 3pm.

National Bakery
In 1960 this coal and wood shop that fuelled the ovens of the bakeries around it was converted into a bakery by Abdul Bari Khan, father of the current co-owner Abdul Hadi Khan. Today, it boasts many of Bandra’s Hindi film actors among its clientele, says Khan. Salman Khan is a customer, Dilip Kumar loves their sheermal, and Ratna Pathak Shah stops by for naan. Their menu is loaded with stuffed savoury bread rolls, burgers, fried chicken in all forms from lollipops to croquettes, puffs and patties, soups, biscuits, khari, donuts, and un-iced cakes.They bake fresh batches at 6am, 11am, 4pm, 7pm, and midnight every day. So what if their croissants are just folded and baked bread dough? Line up early morning for brun pao, soft pao and sweet coconut pie – their bestsellers. Don’t get confused by what the staff calls “complex biscuit” – indeed it does have a more complex texture and description than the staff can manage to explain, but once you buy one you’ll realise that’s how they like to say “cornflakes”.
11B Bazaar Road, Bandra (West). Tel: 98331 42246. Open daily, from 6am to 11pm. Prices range from Rs2 for a single brun pao to Rs240 for a kilo of kaju cookies.

Rajinder Kulfiwala
Closer to the Town Market end of Bazaar Road, near the broiler shops and Kalidas Vishram is one of the last few traditional stick kulfi sellers left in the city. Rajinder serves only one flavour – malai – and he announces his wares by pulling on a rope looped into a peg on his cart, which in turn swings a large bell under it. His refrigeration technique is salted ice, no electricity required. Students from the many schools in the area stop by on the way to or back from class for a cold sweet treat. He unmoulds it, dips it into a doodhwala’s steel can and hands it to them. He claims it’s malai – to me it looked more like thick sugar syrup. If nothing else, his cart is ridiculously Instagram-worthy.
Outside Dastarkhwan Caterers, Wad-e-Gulshan Building, near Jain Mandir, 59 Bazaar Road, Bandra (West). Open daily, from 9am to 3pm or until stocks last. Prices range from Rs5 for a small kulfi to Rs10 for a large kulfi.

Safe Catering (previously Lucky Star Catering)
“The owner decided to change the name to Safe, that’s all we know,” said one of the boys after we got half our rich dabba gosht packed because we couldn’t finish eating it. Safe probably comes from Saifuddin Hussain, the name of the owner who wasn’t able to chat with us because he is travelling. Everyone around still calls it Lucky Star Catering, though. Kimenna Godfrey said that before Lucky Star there was a restaurant called A1, also known as Haji Hotel on this spot that was loved for its “very reasonable food”. Safe’s offerings seem to be a copy of Jeff’s – mutton mince balls, chicken mince balls, chicken tandoori, white chicken tandoori, seekh kebabs, lacy cutlets. We tried the one thing that we didn’t see at Jeff’s counter – dabba gosht. Here, it’s a creamy casserole loaded with peas, carrots, white sauce and chunks of poultry, the top layer satisfyingly crisp and chewy and oozing fat. You won’t need lip balm after you eat this one.
143A Bazaar Road, Noor Manzil, Chapel Road junction, Bandra (West). Tel: 98208 06451. Open daily, from 11.30am to 2pm and from 4.30pm to 10pm. Prices start from Rs20 for 50 grams of minced chicken balls; small chicken dabba gosht for Rs75; small mutton dabba gosht for Rs100; Rs120 for 600 grams of biryani.

Shree Sai Ram Hot Chips
“All kinds of waffers and farsan/Using Gemini Sunflower Oil” – the sign outside this shop says more than the shop boys inside. You can’t blame them. At the door one of them slices bananas and potatoes into a giant kadhai filled with the aforementioned hot oil, working the mandoline so fast, you can’t help but cringe expecting him to take off some skin with each stroke. The other doles out samples from the scores of chivdas, wafers, and other deep fried savoury snacks lining the shop in glass bins and plastic bags. The spicy fried potato strips with chillies and curry leaves are sinus tingling and would be fantastic with a squirt of lime. This Hot Chips is not related to the ones found in Matunga, Andheri and elsewhere. You know that they are rooted in the neighbourhood because they are also possibly the only Hot Chips shop in the city to sell rose cookies.
116 Bazaar Road, near National Bakery, Bandra (West). Tel: 97026 86808. Open daily, from 8am to 10pm. Prices range from Rs160 for a kilo of farsan to Rs300 for a kilo of masala wafers. Rose cookies, Rs30 for a packet of ten.

Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and the restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.

“I wish I had your job!”

Like most restaurant critics in the city, I am often told this just after I tell somebody what I do. Before they even start their next sentence I’m already guessing how they will complete it. “What fun it must be to go to every new restaurant in town/get to eat out for free/be paid to eat/try so many different kinds of food.” To this, I say – to save time for both of us and to keep things lighthearted – “As far as jobs that can make you fat go, I guess it’s fun.”

The truth is, it’s mostly boring.

It could be a fun job – in most other big cities in the world, and a few smaller ones. But in Mumbai, it quickly gets mind-numbingly dull and old. We may not tell everyone we meet, but amongst us restaurant critics – folks who go to every new joint in town because it’s our oh-so-enviable job – we quickly admit that Mumbai’s bustling new restaurant scene is in fact achingly tedious. A couple of times a week, we diverge from our usual commute to check out the latest place, with a flicker of hope that it will thrill us, introduce a menu that is edgy for our city, show us new ways with foods that we are familiar with, or even just do something old and traditional, but amaze us with how we’d been missing the point of the dish all along.

Instead, in the last year, almost always, we have got a mess of multiple cuisines; or a sloppy localised, sitting-on-the-fence rendition of just one. Or a rehash of the soup-salad-sandwich-pasta-pizza-burger-gooey chocolate cake format with just enough tweaks to prevent us from calling it an outright copy of a successful deli down the street. Or a risk-free, pedestrian and forgettable but on-trend place riding a wave, any current wave – it could be cupcakes, pan-Asian, all-day cafe – but only with a short-term survival plan.

And I think we deserve it. We deserve each of these banal, vapid meals. Anyone, who complains about Mumbai’s dull dining is responsible for them, me included. Because, as restaurant goers, most of us Mumbaikars are unadventurous but fussy, demanding but limiting, price-conscious but wasteful.

“Restaurateurs are embracing and breeding mediocrity because the market is so wide open,” says chef Rahul Akerkar, founder of deGustibus Hospitality, which owns Indigo, Indigo Deli and Neel at Tote on The Turf. “We love to eat, but I don’t think we get nuance. We have the money, but not the exposure. Does the diner here care that you are using one olive oil over another? I don’t think so.”

We reward this mediocrity with our money. A few days ago, we went to a new, very hip al fresco restaurant and bar. The music was loud and it was crowded, but everyone looked good and smelled fantastic. Online reviews were encouraging, if not glowing. Six of us had a few rounds of appetisers and a poorly-made cocktail each, and paid a total of Rs18,000 for it. The most popular item in the room were flatbreads, every table had a couple of them. This kind of money would buy us an outstanding, memorable meal in any big food-loving city in the world. Here, it was forgettable, but we were still buying into it.

While it’s most obvious and horrifying at the fancier places, our love for the passable, as long as it’s familiar or done our way, has propagated a crush of mid-level restaurants that are clones of others and each other in the last year. Young entrepreneurs who are keen on getting into the restaurant industry are boldly dealing with intimidating rents and licences and limited talent in a tough city, but afraid to go out on a limb with the food, because they’re scared they won’t survive if they try to experiment. We won’t let them. The conventional gets our cash.

The industry here has done lots of experiments,” says Riyaaz Amlani of Impresario Hospitality, which owns the Salt Water Cafe and Smoke House Deli chains. “And whenever we have done it, it hasn’t really worked. Sooner or later the restaurant shuts down, or it toes the line.” There are dishes that Gresham Fernandes, executive chef at Impresario, has been utterly confident about because they were big hits during multiple tastings, before they were put on the menu. Eventually, they had to be taken off because customers either ignored or rejected them. Like for instance a delicately seared rainbow trout with seven sauces, including fennel, lemon and garlic, swiped across the plate. “Customers found it too dry,” says Fernandes, “Because we [in Mumbai] prefer our fish to be well done and saucy.”

Ideally, according to Fernandes, restaurants should try and make dishes that cannot be replicated by others. Instead, most food experimentation is taking place outside the restaurant, in what Amlani calls “unprogrammed spaces” where making enough profit to stay in business is not the primary motive. It’s at events like Swine Dine, The Gypsy Kitchen and The Secret Supper Project. It’s a handful of people selling bacon jam and local brie from their small kitchens at food-based events.

Moreover, most new restaurants are patronised by a critical mass of people who like to eat out often, and have the money to be able to afford it, but also come from a population with very strong dietary preferences, which in turn are community-based and largely morally bound. There are many vegetarians, among them people who don’t eat potatoes, or onions and garlic. Among the non-vegetarians, some don’t eat pork, others eschew beef. It’s also becoming increasingly common for people to give up certain ingredients for diet fads, and idiosyncrasies. That is a lot of limitations on menu planning for any chef. I have heard stories from chefs about straight-faced (and sometimes indignant) customers requesting garlic bread without garlic, a sunny side up without the yolk, hazelnut mousse without nuts, and melon feta salad sans melon, please.

We’re also weird about spending money. Some of us go out to a blindingly expensive place not because the food is worth it, but because it’s expensive – places serving well done local lamb chops passing them off as New Zealand imports, or a half cup of vegetable sticky rice for Rs1,000, or nachos with cheese sauce that may not have come from a milch animal. We love affordable places, because we’re price conscious and we love to go out to eat, as long as they don’t surprise us too much. We’re even more forgiving of mostly mediocre food if they follow this formula. This and a little bit of marketing, and you’re in the black. As long as we liked a couple of dishes, and you gave us decent service, we’ll take it. It’s hard to say which one is more wasteful.

By decent service we mean we expect everyone to bend over backwards, of course, no matter what’s on the menu. Terrible service needs to be called out, and none of us should tolerate rudeness or poor hygiene, I agree, but what’s a new slightly brave kitchen to do when its offering to stretch our palate a bit step by step and we repay them with pigheadedness? These are all real customer requests from the last few months – risotto khichdi, braised oxtail well done, penne mixed with spaghetti and cream sauce.

Deny us and if we’re kind, we’ll only get righteous. We’re paying for the meal after all. “The most common request at Salt Water Cafe is pasta with pink sauce,” says Amlani. “We’ll hear ‘But you have red sauce and white sauce on your menu, so just mix it and give it to me’.”

So yes, our restaurant scene is boring, staid, repetitive. But the next time you complain, don’t just blame the restaurateurs, or the high rents or the red tape that make it difficult to get the scene we deserve – that we say we want. Because we also have ourselves to blame.

Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and the restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.

When I was a kid, on my grandma’s and my mom’s insistence, we’d make ghee at home. Every day, litres of cow’s milk would arrive at our doorstep at the crack of dawn – squat bottles of thick glass with foil lids striped in blue or orange. Our cook would boil the milk, then lift off the thick layer of malai on the surface and put the steel container in the freezer. After a couple of weeks, we’d have a substantial mound made of sheets of malai. The cook would slide this into a kadhai and simmer it until the milk solids had separated into brown crunchy bits at the bottom, and all the water content had evaporated. The resultant golden liquid would be strained and cooled, and put into a tin where it eventually became creamy and granular. (This method was our shortcut. The traditional way to make ghee at home involves an additional two steps – making yoghurt and lifting the fat off it, and then churning it to make butter which is then clarified into ghee by heating it.)

I would wait for these ghee-making days. Our apartment would smell amazing, redolent with the aromas of milk fat. (To me, at least. I had cousins who said it smelled like vomit. I didn’t like these cousins.) My mom would put the strained-off brown crunchy fried milk solids in a bowl, top them with a sprinkle of sugar and hand it to me. I’d take the bowl and a book, and sit in a corner on the floor of my grandma’s balcony and move very little until I was done with the bowl or the book. My grandmom looked on kindly and heartily approved of my healthful habits. Later, when the cook made thick Sindhi chapatis smeared with ghee, I’d pull a tablespoonful out of the ghee tin and slowly let the granules dissolve and coat my tongue. No one ever warned me about cholesterol or weight gain, and I haven’t had much reason to worry about them so far.

Like many Indians, I love ghee, and I love cooking food in it. There are many long-held reasons not to – it’s not just fat at nine calories per gram; it’s animal fat; it’s saturated fat; it’s solid at room temperature; it’s the kind that reportedly directly increases LDL cholesterol, the bad kind that clogs our arteries and causes heart disease. On the other hand, there are many reasons to love it – not only because it has that rich flavour and mouth-coating fattiness that makes us feel satisfied for longer, but also because it may actually be good for us, better than many other fats. Lately, after decades of debate and flip-flopping, butter is popular again, this time as a healthy fat. Latest studies say that butter helps us lose weight, that people who eat vegetable fat have higher death rates than people who eat animal fat, and that there are no links between saturated fat and cardiovascular disease.

Ghee is nothing else but butter with the moisture and milk solids removed. Unlike butter however, it is considered vital in traditional medicine. Our historic Ayurvedic texts have long claimed that it is nothing less than miraculous in its health properties. There are papers that say ghee is much better than butter. They say it prevents disease, promotes longevity, improves memory, and lubricates the body. Modern medicine cannot deny that it contains essential fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K. Recent studies say that moderate consumption may even lower the prevalence of coronary artery disease in men, and ease symptoms of psoriasis. Ghee contains 25 per cent medium- and short-chain fatty acids (SFCAs), as opposed to butter’s 12 to 15 per cent (SFCAs have been linked to better colon health, including the prevention of cancer). It also has a higher smoking point (252 degrees Celsius) than vegetable fats like peanut, soybean, sunflower and olive oil, making it better for high-heat cooking methods such as frying. (When fat starts smoking it means it’s decomposing and becoming toxic.) So should we be eating ghee or not? I spoke with a few medical professionals to find out what they think.

“I don’t recommend ghee,” says cardiologist Dr. Sharukh Golwalla. “But then people who come to me typically already have a problem. Diet doesn’t create high cholesterol, high cholesterol is a genetic tendency. The dietary role is small, but the condition is made worse with saturated fatty acids, it adds to the issues of cholesterol.” It doesn’t help that as a race, we’re ‘genetically prone to heart disease’, or that we have smaller coronary arteries. We’re also a generation for which physical activity is a choice. “Very often you’ll find the kids of the house having no ghee on their rotis, and the elders will think that that’s a stupid choice,” says Dr. Saumil Kapadia, a family physician. “My grandfather ate ghee every day and lived up to the age of 98. But then he also walked for five hours a day, every day. [Young people] today don’t have that level of exercise and we also eat a lot more junk food than previous generations did.” There are other concerns, because of the nature of our dairy industry. Ghee from grass-fed milch animals is said to be heart-healthier than that from grain-fed animals, but not only do we not know what our cows and buffaloes eat, we also don’t know if they’re being pumped with hormones and antibiotics. The best we can do is buy our ghee from a reliable supplier that we trust.

To buy ghee for my household, I go to Belgaum Ghee Depot, a 71-year-old shop in Nana Chowk that defined its original business in its name. The owner, a lady who is as old as the shop but looks about two decades younger, told me that people who know how to eat good food eat ghee. Though their bags of clarified butter are now put away on a shelf to the side (bread-based snacks such as sandwiches and rolls are displayed up front), the shop still sells cow and buffalo ghee – from Porbandar now, ever since supplies from Belgaum became difficult. (Fans believe that ghee from these cities is both healthier and tastier.)  When I asked the owner about the difference between ghee from cow milk and buffalo milk, she said that buffalo milk ghee is heavier, and more difficult to digest, but it has a more easily likeable, milder smell. Also, anyone who has had both knows that buffalo milk ghee is white, cow milk ghee is yellow (because of higher carotene levels). There are also other differences in cholesterol and fat levels. Ayurveda prefers cow milk ghee and considers it more pure or sattvik; modern medicine says buffalo milk ghee might be healthier. (The owner of Belgaum Ghee Depot says that ghee from buffalo milk makes us like buffaloes, strong and bulky, but slow and lazy.)

While I heard plenty of strange and even funny theories while chatting with people about ghee, the most outrageous idea I’ve heard yet about about the consumption of ghee for better health came from a naturopath who told me about a kriya (or practice) called snehapana in which “internal oleation” is performed as part of a cleanse. “The patient is fed one kilo of ghee, one spoonful after another, over one day,” said Dr. Sailesh Surve, who has a degree in naturopathy and a PhD in alternative medicine. “It detoxifies the system, softens the intestines, smoothens the bowels, and brings warmth to the body. And no, it doesn’t make you put on any weight, because it passes right through the body.” Surve says that one or two tablespoons of ghee every night is a great remedy for weak eyes, weak muscles and hair loss.

Because I like the way it tastes on my roti, in my dal and sabzi, and even on my popcorn, I would like to believe that ghee might not be so bad for us after all. But then research, even medical research, as we have seen with the butter studies above, keeps revealing new facts. The only thing that remained undisputed through all my conversations with ghee aficionados, doctors, and dietitians was this: be judicious – have more than your body can burn up, and it will make you fat. “I will even give ghee, bindass, to patients with high cholesterol,” says Surve. “But like with everything else, you cannot cross limits. And you have to exercise regularly.” None of us can argue with that.

Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and the restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.

What is a foodie? A person who likes to eat? A person who eats a lot? Or someone who talks about food a lot? Maybe a foodie is someone who tries all the new places? Does a foodie have to like MasterChef? Are they talking about foodies in this song? Is a foodie simply a person with an opinion about food, and the desire to broadcast it, one way or another? Might we all be foodies then?

As much as we’d like to think that our fascination with food is at its peak now, the word “foodie” was coined and came into use in two different parts of the world about 30 years ago. Food writer Gael Greene appears to have used it in a piece in New York magazine in 1980. Journalist Paul Levy claims paternity as well, stating that it was initially meant to be a term of abuse, before it came into common convenient use. Merriam Webster takes the gentler route and describes the foodie as “a person who enjoys and cares about food very much”, while the crowd-sourced Urban Dictionary takes a less kind view (fat, hobby-less douchebag, anyone?).

Indeed, the word has veered back into the realm of mockery. This is because everything to do with food has become fashionable and on trend, and most of us want in. “It wasn’t like this earlier – now being a bartender or a chef is considered a cool, glamorous thing,” says Gauri Devidayal, owner of The Table restaurant in Colaba. “People want to be associated with them. It’s like the film industry in a way. People want photographs with chefs.” Chefs are the new rockstars, and we’re the eager groupies.

It helps that food is also an easy target. Not everybody follows music, not everyone loves Bollywood, theatre and the arts attract a limited crowd, and comedy shows are not vital to our lives. We may not always bother dressing fashionably, and may not have much of a reading habit, and surely there are a few of us who are not keen on cricket or politics. But everyone eats. All of us. Food is now entertainment, but it is also the only one that is essential. We can all be foodies.

Who is to say that a person who knows the difference between quenelle and duxelle is better or worse than a person who can distinguish between kokum and kodumpulli in a blind tasting? We’re all using the right words now, because they are all around us – on television and on Twitter, on blogs and Tumblrs, Facebook pages and on restaurant listing websites. We read about, eat and then talk about confits and compotes, even if we can’t tell the difference.

We feel like we’re experts on food, because we all eat. We follow international chefs on Twitter, we watch aspiring ones make detailed, complex dishes on MasterChef – preparations that take hours are edited down to minutes. We’re now not only experts, we’re now instant experts. Because we saw someone chiffonade herbs on TV, we saw the Wikipedia entry for sous-vide, we tweeted about the best biryani in town, we feel we can now talk about food with some authority. We’re even on a winning streak on Quiz Up, dammit!

And in this access, as much fun as it is, lies the problem. Because there is so much of it, it’s suddenly become perfectly fine to just skim the surface.

“One lady came to our shop and asked for eggless macarons”, says Pooja Dhingra. “When the staff explained that a macaron cannot be eggless [the shell is a meringue, made of egg white, sugar and almond powder], and that even if they can be, we don’t make them, she said ‘Pooja makes eggless macarons all the time for me’. I was sitting at the counter, so I stood up and said, ‘Hi, I am Pooja.’” It’s not even like we’re getting only the specialised, esoteric, complex stuff wrong. Restaurateurs have said that they have been asked, with assured confidence, for Jain garlic bread. One customer gave an owner a five-minute lecture on how the aubergines in a dish were overcooked – except that the dish she was talking about was an artichoke risotto.

It can be in a dining room or on Twitter – everywhere now conversations about food are half-informed opinion – all garnish, less meat. We liked this, we didn’t like that, that was oversalted, and this was undercooked. We’re righteous and vehement and we’re proud of it, and we’ll let know everyone – restaurateurs, chefs, our real friends, our Facebook friends, our followers, people we’ve met for the first time at someone’s dinner table – know exactly what we think, never mind how much we actually know. Often we’ll declare it in 140 characters or less (or worse, #ughhashtags), sometimes even while we’re chewing on the very thing that we are so strongly opining about. The people who are best known are the ones who make the most noise and then sell it well. And now, more than ever before, we can broadcast our opinions about everything. We can shout it out from our digital rooftops, and there’s nothing to stop us except a faulty data connection.

PR people are full of stories about people who claim to know food. One blogger pointed to a dish of crispy okra and said that he “doesn’t much care for baingan”. Another food writer complained that the scoop of ice cream in a mini cone “doesn’t reach the bottom”. “When we invite people for a food event, we select them because they have many followers or they are influencers,” says Tripti Bhatia Gandhi, owner of DeTales Marketing and Communications. “Of course it depends from client to client, but it doesn’t really matter how much [the invitees] know about food.” Ignorance is bliss, and in the name of marketing, it is also well-fed.

Social media might create the illusion, but just because our opinions are strong, and we have an audience for them, it doesn’t mean that they are important or informed. In Levy’s piece above, he talks about how the word foodie came about because “perfectly sane people had suddenly become obsessed with every aspect of food”. But obsession by its very nature is a consuming thing, it demands an investment, of time, energy and thought. When we say the word “techie” we think of someone who knows all sorts of innocuous details about devices, someone with proficiency and skill, and a deep understanding of the subject. Not so much when we think of foodies and food.

This is a great time for all of us who love food. I love that we can share our best meals on Instagram and Twitter while simultaneously keeping track of both Dominique Ansel’s mind-bending creations, and all the fun new food events in Mumbai. I love that we can, if we should decide to find out about the best rasta sandwich in our city, ask the question on Twitter, and have a dozen options in an hour. I love our growing confidence about food, because it also means we have more exposure than ever before. I love that we have enough food television to watch all day every day. I love how emotionally vested we are in our opinions about food.

We have more access to information about food than humans have had in the history of eating, and all we’re doing is adding to the noise around it. In any other field – EDM, comic books, gaming – a true geek takes pleasure in knowledge and in swapping this knowledge with other nerds. And so, instead of being foodies, we should now aspire to be food geeks or food nerds. There is delight in trying to figure out why grapes don’t ripen after they are picked, in understanding why baking soda aids caramelisation, and how Babur’s nomadic ways contributed to our cuisine. It’s definitely more fun than whining about slow service, and far more interesting than tweeting, “This #pizza is the Best. Thing. Ever.”

Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and the restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.