Every week, there are at least two new restaurants that are new enough to qualify for reviews. Yet, when friends or family ask me, “What’s a new place that is good? What you would recommend?” I struggle to find an answer.
This is a city that is going food mad, yes. But so little of it is truly great. Once in six months, at best, ONE new restaurant will blow my socks off. Often, a few months later, it too concedes to mediocrity. Most times, trying out a new place involves eating astonishingly average food at all-day cafes and delis, which are trying their best to imitate older, successful all-day cafes, delis, chains, or even coffee shops.
Going by the openings over the last year, this is what seems to work best: a low-risk format serving a very long but standard menu of unadventurous soups, salads, sandwiches, pizzas, desserts, and all-day breakfasts. In other words, the food scene in Mumbai is fast becoming a rash of boringly familiar poor imitations. What’s on the plate hardly matters, or is certainly less important than the location and the price.
Yes, we have made considerable progress in the last few years. We have restaurants such as The Table and Ellipsis that are taking risks and helping us expand our ideas about good food. They offer us flavour and texture combinations through techniques that we haven’t seen before in the city, in the form of dishes that look like pieces of art, and draw influences from around the globe without them ever falling into the category of multi-cuisine. We also have new family-run eateries like Mi Maratha, Royal Sindh, and even an upscale chain in Rajdhani’s Rasovara, to remind us of our diverse local cuisine. But are we a great food city by any global measure? Not quite.
I got thinking about this a couple of weeks ago, when I read this article in The Washington Post. It says, “Great food cities are ones with a discernible tradition, ones that have good grocery stores and markets; many small stores run by people with single-minded devotion to food craft — to charcuterie, coffee, bread, cheese and ice cream — and relatively easy access to really good produce and other ingredients.”
In recent months, we’ve had food entrepreneurs give the city artisanal bread shops, cookie-catering cars, gourmet kebab sandwich stalls and home-grown Chevre. It seems like an exciting time to be a part of the industry. But really – these excite us more because they are the exceptions rather than the rule. A couple of truly novel food ideas come along every year, and they occupy us, even keep us enraptured, for months. In great food cities around the world – such as Paris, or New York, or Hong Kong, or Sydney – scores of such businesses open every month, and most of them are very good.
“The bureaucracy and local bodies offer no support structure for entrepreneurs [in the food industry],” says Gauri Devidayal, owner of The Table. “It’s all very off-putting for restaurateurs who want to do everything by the book.” Here’s an example: it’s been six months since the city got its first microbrewery, but it is yet to start serving house brews. That is six months of a massive investment in brewing equipment, all of it idle. In the meanwhile, Delhi, Bengaluru and Pune, all have busy and successful microbreweries.
What we do have is foods that are iconic of our city. We have fantastic street food. We have an interesting and rich food history. Mumbai contains multiple communities, and pockets in the city reflect their food tastes and traditions. However, we haven’t got the diversity of cuisine that develops in cities that attract immigrants. Instead, self-declared food experts abound on social media, and marketing helps mask mediocrity. We take pictures of every pizza we eat, but neglect the various kinds of paniyaram. It’s been over two years since this was published, but it still rings true.
We have supermarket chains that pay more attention to imported packaged goods, or iceberg lettuce, and less to local delicacies like the massively nutritious bathua (also called tanjaliya) greens, or the five varieties of dried red chillies available at any self-respecting masalewala. Devidayal says that even for restaurants, getting a consistent supply of varied ingredients is extremely difficult. It’s part of the reason why restaurants have daily changing menus.
We’re also a difficult, somewhat unadventurous, and price-conscious market. “People playing it safe is perhaps a reflection of the times,” says Mangal Dalal, Restaurant Week India co-founder. “[There was a while during which] Mexican places got shot down because we grew up on New Yorker.”
We may not be a globally great food city yet, but there is hope in numbers. Perhaps this proliferation of restaurants and recent enthusiasm for new ideas and products in food is part of the process that gets us there. “Right now we’re trying to catch up with quantity,” says Dalal. “Over time this means we’ll catch up with quality. Once people stop accepting mediocre places, they will have to stop being mediocre.”
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.