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.