Photo: Sheena Dabholkar.
In the 1940s, Badrinarayan Bhatwal Sharma came to Mumbai from Jaipur and set up a bhel stall in front of Nathalal Bhavan in Sikka Nagar. This was no ordinary bhel stall. It sold the “world’s first golden bhel”. The bhel got its name from “golden chutney”, a condiment the food-loving Sharma had invented. This chutney was called golden because it had a bright mustard hue speckled with bits of black and green, and contained yellow channa, lavingya marcha (a variety of chilli peppers), turmeric and 16 more spices among other ingredients.
This is the story 21-year-old Nimesh Sharma, the great-grandson of Badrinayan, will tell you when you visit Golden Bhelpuri House behind the clock tower in Sikka Nagar, near Bhuleshwar. GBH has occupied this spot since 1960, when Badrinarayan’s son Sitaram Sharma set up his shop here. “Badrinarayan was among the first bhelwalas in Mumbai,” says Nimesh Sharma. “But the name Sitaram Sharma is most associated with golden bhel.”
Several bhelwalas in the city have tried to replicate this channa-based chutney, even if they don’t always call it golden. But Nimesh Sharma claims that nobody has been able to recreate the layered aromas and texture of their proprietary recipe yet. Having sampled quite a few other versions of golden chutney, I’d have to agree. Nimesh Sharma says that Rajkot chutney is in fact an interpretation of golden chutney. People carry parcels of GBH’s dry chutney (which keeps forever in the fridge) all over the world, to South Africa, the UK and the USA (I can attest to this, some of my family and friends have sent care packages to my cousins studying there).
It’s near-impossible to identify the spices in it. GBH’s recipe for golden chutney has been handed down from generation to generation, and even today Sharma and his mother make the chutney at home (His father Dharmesh Sharma ran the business until he passed away four years ago, and Nimesh has since taken over). Even the staff of boys who operate the stall don’t know the exact ingredients or their proportions in the recipe.
Golden chutney tastes nothing like the chutneys offered at other bhelwalas. It is at first grainy and salty, and then the battalion of aromatic spices hits the olfactory system. It ends with a slightly chewy finish, similar-to-but-not-quite the texture of a very dry coconut chutney. This is when you fully appreciate the lavingya marcha. Your face heats up a little, your upper lip may become damp with sweat, and the sides of your tongue tingle.
The chutney can be used in anything, including sukha bhel, sev puri, or aloo chat, each of which are offered at GBH. But it is most famously mixed into golden bhel, where dry chutney is mixed with some water to loosen it up, and then tossed into the bhel made with pohe (beaten rice) instead of kurmura (puffed rice). (Vithal Bhelwala near CST also offers something called golden bhel made with pohe. But Vithal’s chutney is powdery, more like molagapudi or gunpowder, than golden.) I like GBH’s golden chutney best in a standard sukha bhel, or on lime juice-soaked sev puri. I have also bought the 100 grams parcel GBH offers, taken it home and added it to salad dressings, or spread it in sandwiches, sprinkled it on boiled rajma or peanuts, thickly applied it inside a roti roll, or mixed it with yoghurt to make a crudite dip. I suspect I’ll find more uses.
In GBH’s heyday, before the city became so insular, people from every neighbourhood and every strata of Mumbai society would come to eat at the stall. “People would place their order from there,” says Sharma, pointing to a spot about eight metres away. “The crowd around would be that big.” He says that even Sanjay Dutt and Bal Thackeray have stood in line at GBH. During their busiest years, they sold 4,000 plates of food a day. Today it’s about 100, both because the generation that made it what it was has passed on, and because of difficult circumstances in the family.
Even so, there is always a steel drum filled with 20 kilograms of golden chutney at the stall at all times, and Sharma says he goes through seven kilos of chillis a day while prepping it. The recent Commerce graduate is looking at ways to expand, and he knows there is potential. Anyone who meets him will concur that he’s also a rare specimen: one of the hippest bhelwalas in the city, a cool kid who has invested in his family’s street stall. He advertises his interest in catering opportunities on the stall’s painted menu board. “We’ve catered for an Ambani-family wedding at the Turf Club,” he says. “They brought down the best street food stalls from all over the country, and we were there.”
One golden bhel is priced at Rs20; a packet of 100 grams of golden chutney is priced at Rs25.
Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor atVogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and the restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.