The complete WSJ article for foodies…

Bustling Bombay’s Hidden Treasures;
Sesser Taps Countless Regional Foods

By STAN SESSER
March 14, 2003

BOMBAY — Because so few taxis are air-conditioned and ventilation comes solely through the open windows, there’s no blocking out the realities of this city. As we snake through the heavy traffic to the accompaniment of incessant horn honking, beggars lie in wait at every red light. Disfigured children, wailing mothers holding sick-looking babies, people missing arms and legs — they all come to the taxi window and plead for money, making the wait for the light to change seem like an eternity.

Then we arrive at Sin Bistro near the American Consulate, where I’m meeting a Singaporean friend for a drink. From the beanbag chairs, to the stylish waiters, to the flat-screen TV hanging from the ceiling, everything says “trendy.” We can order Mediterranean food, wines from around the world, and coffee from a list divided into countries where the beans originated. My friend and I choose a concoction called Kala Khatta — fresh lime juice in soda, spiced by ground pepper. Our two glasses of lime juice cost $6 plus tip, enough to feed one of those beggars for a couple of weeks.

Bombay is a city of sharp and often wrenching contrasts, where astonishingly good restaurants showcasing regional Indian cuisines coexist with hunger and poverty. Since my last visit two years ago, the homeless population seems to have multiplied dramatically, sleeping directly on the sidewalks, without even a tarp to cover them. Yet as poverty spreads, so does opulence, exemplified by the mushrooming of stylish, pricey restaurants. Even many of the local places, formerly featuring great food and great atmosphere, have tried to get in on the act, robbing themselves of atmosphere by remodeling themselves into a style that can best be called “coffee shop plush.”

Along with this growing prosperity has come a heightened interest in eating out. “This is a very recent phenomenon,” says Rashmi Uday Singh, who writes books about Bombay’s cuisine. “There’s more disposable income and more dual-income families with no one staying home to cook. Going to a restaurant has slowly started replacing other forms of entertainment like dance performances. It has become exciting for us.”

“Exciting” was exactly my reaction on this trip, as I ate my way through Bombay. I had previously spent only a few days in India, and I knew Indian food largely from restaurants in San Francisco, New York, London and Bangkok. No matter what city, the menus all read the same and the food all tasted the same: oven-baked tandoori chicken dyed bright red with food coloring, and leaden curries with rich, creamy gravies that sit in your stomach, making you resolve not to have another Indian meal for months.

These curries, Ms. Singh explains, were the heritage of the Punjabis. Punjab was the site of fierce battles and finally partition when an independent India and Pakistan were born, sending many of the region’s residents fleeing to other countries. In their new homes, Punjabis became known for running restaurants, and their adaptation of tandoori dishes and the heavy Mughlai-style curries, which came originally from the period of Mughal rule in Delhi that ended in the 18th century, soon became identified as “Indian” cuisine in the eyes of the rest of the world.

I’m proud to say that over the course of about 20 meals in Bombay, I didn’t have a Punjabi curry or tandoori chicken once. And I only felt overstuffed a single time, at a Muslim restaurant called Shalimar, where the style of food features huge portions of heavy meats. (It’s definitely not on the list of restaurants that follows.)

Other than this, the food in Bombay was a revelation. Day after day, I ate wonderful regional cuisines I had not known existed. They were all different; they were light; they were bursting with spices that had nothing to do with the ubiquitous “curry powder” we know so well outside India. (“Curry powder”-most often ground cumin, coriander and turmeric-is a British invention; Indians call everything that comes in a sauce a curry, no matter what the spices.)

SESSER’S TOP BOMBAY DISHES

1. King crab in butter, garlic and black pepper at Trishna.

2. “Goan sausage chilly fried” at New Martin’s Hotel Eating House.

3. Cappuccino souffle at Indigo.

4. “Thali pith” multigrain pancake with chickpea curry at Swati Snacks.

5. Whole fish steamed with coriander and mint at Jimmy Boy.

Early on in my visit, Vikram Doctor, a writer for the Economic Times of India who possesses an awesome knowledge of Indian food, presented me with a list of the regional cuisines represented in Bombay that he felt I should try. (That added to an already long list from Vikram Aggarwal, proprietor of eat2eat.com, the Asian restaurant reservation Web site, and Harish and Julie Mehta, authors of a recently published biography of Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen.) Mr. Doctor set out a dozen regional cuisines, some with names I had never encountered, including Malayali (the food of southern Kerala), Malvani (from a coastal region south of Bombay) and Sindhi (from a region of Pakistan.) I got to sample the food of Goa, combining the rich, tomato-based sauces of Portugal with fiery Indian spices. There was Parsi, the food of the Persians who fled to India centuries ago, which still has many similarities to what’s eaten today in the Middle East. And Gujarati, the vegetarian cooking of the sizeable Gujarati minority in Bombay who speak their own language. Perhaps most esoteric of all is Jain cuisine, from a religion with such a reverence for life that they’re not only vegetarians, but won’t eat root vegetables because little bugs might have been killed in the process of pulling them up.

What a cornucopia, ranging from mild to fiery, with all sorts of textures and tastes. And yet this list completely ignores one of the best things about the food in Bombay: snacks. In Bombay, a snack is a high art form of little dishes eaten mainly at lunch. Bhelpuri, one of the most popular snacks, is a heaping plate of at least a dozen ingredients, including crisp noodles, puffed rice, coriander leaves, minced onions, chopped-up puris (the puffy Indian bread), chutney and chilies. One of the most famous snack restaurants, Vithal Bhelwala, near Victoria Terminus, does about 10 different variations of bhelpuri, including a British bhelpuri that has boiled vegetables and Corn Flakes in it. This landmark restaurant, founded in 1875, even offers an air-freight box so that customers can whisk these snacks to hungry relatives abroad who can’t live without them. But Vithal Bhelwala gets bumped off the listings by Swati, a snack restaurant whose offerings are pure poetry.

There’s only one type of food I’ll warn you away from, and that’s Chinese. As recently as a decade ago, before regional cuisines were all the rage, Bombay residents settled on Chinese as the food they wanted to eat in restaurants because they couldn’t eat it at home. It became such a tradition that any restaurant with pretensions had to have some Chinese dishes on the menu. Even Trishna, a seafood place that’s worth a flight to Bombay in itself, still offers the stir-fried mishmash chop suey and chow mein noodles along with the seafood. But this isn’t ordinary Chinese food, if my samplings of some of Bombay’s Chinese dishes are any indication. Instead, it’s an amalgam of the worst of Chinese food and the worst of Indian food. “Leaden” is a description that hardly does it justice.

Chinese food aside, a word of advice if you’re overwhelmed by all the choices in Bombay: pay greatest attention to the seafood of the Konkan, which refers to the West Indian coastline starting south of Bombay and going all the way to Kerala. Konkani seafood has always been in Bombay, Mr. Doctor explains, but it was largely ignored because it was cooked by and for the mill workers who had migrated from the Konkan coast. “This has been the big discovery of the last several years,” he says. “It’s really the reason to come to Bombay to eat.”

Bombay takes a bit of navigation, so you’re going to need some resolve to get to the restaurants I recommend. I’ve made the directions as specific as possible, because many Bombay taxi drivers speak no English and, even if they did, know practically nothing about the city. There are lines of taxis everywhere; my advice is to walk down the street until you see an elderly taxi driver. Chances are he’ll speak English from British days, and the fact that he’s managed to survive so many years in the horrendous Bombay traffic will be a comforting thought when you’re in the back seat.

Which still leaves two final problems: The first is “Delhi Belly,” the affliction that strikes so many visitors to India (for tips on how to deal with it, see article). Then there’s the question of eating so regally when so many people around you are suffering so visibly. I couldn’t get used to it. Every time I put a coin into someone’s hand, four more hands popped into the taxi window. When I decided to focus on an emaciated 10-year-old girl and her little brother who begged near my hotel, buying them rice, milk powder and toys, their friends besieged me. It won’t help any to avoid Bombay, or not to enjoy your meals because you feel guilty. But at the same time, don’t forget these kids; there are charities for street children all over Bombay, and your hotel concierge or a guidebook can direct you to one.

Trishna

Bombay is the sixth city I’ve visited for this series, and by now I have the food of more than 100 restaurants under my belt. Although many have been spectacular, Trishna is the only one I had to eat at twice, even at the expense of potentially missing another great discovery. I simply couldn’t stand the thought of having to wait until my next trip to Bombay for an additional meal here.

I certainly didn’t come for the atmosphere. One room has dreary banquettes, while the second room tries with minimal success to dress itself up a little with wavy blond-wood designs on the walls and ceiling. With the waiters in dark blue suits and the busboys in red vests, Trishna could just as easily be a steak house in New York that has seen better days.

Forget all this and forget about the tourists who make up a large part of Trishna’s clientele. Instead, think seafood: the most delectable fish and crustaceans that have ever found their way into a fisherman’s net, prepared with superb skill.

The signature dish here — King Crab stir-fried in a sauce of butter, garlic and black pepper — deserves its reputation and merits the $17 price tag, which is a small fortune for a Bombay restaurant. The crab is huge and meaty — the chunks of claw meat alone will fill half a plate. Bigger isn’t necessarily better, but this species of crab, caught in the waters off the West Indian coast, is flavorful and sweet-tasting. And the sauce permeates the shell, perfuming the meat.

There’s lots of pomfret on the menu, but pomfret is common throughout Asia. Order instead the “rawas Hyderabadi,” a local white salmon rubbed with Indian spices and grilled over charcoal. Although it costs only $6, two people could make a whole meal from this salmon, the delicate, sweet-tasting flesh of which needs only a squeeze of lime.

Two more dishes and you have enough for four people. Squid in chilies and garlic present a sauce that’s slightly sweet, slightly sour and more than slightly spicy. There is every sort of dhal in Bombay, the lentil stew that’s so good spooned over rice. But Trishna’s Hyderabad dhal might be the winner of them all, roaring hot from chopped green chilies.

Some Bombay foodies refuse to set foot in Trishna, which they feel is a little too touristy and a little too upscale. But with food like this, in my opinion occasional Bermuda shorts and popping flashbulbs is a very small price to pay.

+ Crab and other seafood good enough to make you weep with joy.

– The tourists, dreary ambiance and mediocre Indian breads.

Trishna,
Sai Baba Marg in the Kala Ghoda section of the Fort district of South Bombay (a nearby landmark is Rhythm House, one of Bombay’s largest record stores. Facing Rhythm House, walk down the street on its left side, called V.B. Gandhi Marg, and take the second left).
Tel: 91-22-2261-4991; reservations are a good idea.
Open: daily, noon to 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. to midnight; dinner hours from 7 p.m. Sundays.
Prices: $10 to $15 a person.
Major credit cards accepted.

Swati Snacks

Snacks, the wonderful little dishes eaten mainly for lunch, are Bombay’s answer to tapas, and they’re all over the city. There’s no need to sit in a restaurant to get them. Yet Swati always has crowds waiting on the sidewalk for a table. When I finished lunch at 2:30, they were still lined up. Some had run out of patience and were eating their takeout snacks standing up outside the restaurant.

The attraction is the fact that Asha Jhaveri, who inherited the 43-year-old Swati from her mother, prepares snacks that people used to make in their homes decades ago. “You get all the specialties your grandmother makes,” says Vikram Doctor, the Economic Times of India correspondent who took me to Swati. “These are the old-fashioned dishes that are so difficult to prepare. This is the one restaurant where you see people who never eat out otherwise.”

Ms. Jhaveri, who thinks the Indian diet is unhealthy because it uses too much white flour, relies on whole grains whenever possible, meaning her various sorts of pancakes used for scooping up curries or dunking in sauces are both nutty and gritty, adding both flavor and texture. It’s actually painful to have to write about the thali pith without being able to eat one at the same time. This is a hard, dark-brown pitted multigrain pancake served with a bowl of chickpea curry. Think about the best multigrain bread you’ve ever eaten and then multiply by two to get an insight into the flavor it imparts.

Every sort of pancake here is interesting and different. Panki is rice-flour batter, scented with turmeric, rolled paper-thin on a banana leaf, then steamed. It’s soft and moist, and you peel it off the banana leaf with your fingers, then dip it in a coriander-green chili sauce. Then there’s pani puri , a variation on puri, the large deep-fried, puffy whole-wheat breads. These are the size of a large coin. You tap a little hole in the top, stuff it with bean sprouts and chickpeas, pour in some tamarind sauce, dunk it in a spicy cumin-flavored sauce, then put the whole thing in your mouth quickly before it falls apart. The different flavors and textures explode at the first bite.

Swati is filled with Indian families eating at a restaurant that’s unfortunately been renovated using lots of stainless steel, producing a seemingly modern look that belies the fact that this is a place to get home cooking of a previous generation.

+ An introduction to Bombay snacks that you won’t soon forget.

– A noise level that makes Bombay traffic seem a whisper by contrast.

Swati Snacks,
248 Karal Estate Rd. in the Tardeo district of South Bombay, across from Bhatia Hospital.
Tel: 91-22-5660-8405.
Open: daily, 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.; no reservations and long waits at peak hours.
Prices: Most snacks are $1 or less; a wide variety of snacks plus drinks, enough to feed four, will cost about $15.
No credit cards accepted.

Udipi Shri Krishna Rama Nayak

The time will surely come for a visitor to Bombay when, no matter how good the food, you can’t bear walking into yet another restaurant remodeled into sheer ugliness. At this point, go to Victoria Terminus and take a commuter train to the Tamil neighborhood, Matunga. You’ll be getting the wonderful, light but spicy vegetarian cuisine of South India.

No one can ever accuse Rama Nayak of being trendy; in case you’re in doubt, a sign informs you that it’s a place “for a blue collared man.” You enter an old building, climb a flight of stairs, and walk into a big room filled with old, scarred tables. The floors are swept and mopped as people eat. One big sign notes that “the owner of this restaurant also eats here,” while another invites patrons to come into the kitchen and observe how spotless it is.

There’s no worry about ordering here. The only choice when you walk in is between a full meal and a la carte, with those wanting a full meal sitting in a special section so the waiters know what to put on their banana leaves. Since a full meal costs all of $1, go ahead and splurge. It’s a bounteous meal too: one dish based on pulses such as beans or chickpeas and two on vegetables; also accompanied by the yogurt drink, lassi; mango juice; rice; puris; the cracker-like papadums; and desserts.

The meal changes every day. Mine consisted of an interesting dish of chopped green bananas tossed with spices, a bean curry in a coconut-based sauce that’s typical of South India, and an unusual curry of bright-red, peeled, uncooked tomatoes. They were all delicious, but I limited myself to four or five helpings of each so that I could save room for dessert.

Put aside all memories of the sickly sweet Indian desserts you’ve had outside of India. Rama Nayak gave us a pleasant saffron-flavored yogurt, as well as cheese balls in a light syrup and a soupy Indian sweetened porridge called payasam. More than sufficient fuel for the train ride back.

+ A wonderful introduction to the banana-leaf dining of South India.

– The ride on an ancient, jammed-packed Indian commuter train is great, but you won’t want to do it often.

Udipi Shri Krishna Rama Nayak,
one floor up, LBS Market Bldg., Matunga (take the Central Line from Victoria Terminus to Matunga Station, a 20-minute ride for six rupees. Exit on the east side; that’s the side where trains are heading back to Victoria. As you walk out of the station, bear left along the railroad tracks until you come to a big building on your right. Rama Nayak is at the furthest-most entrance to this building).
Tel: 91-22-2414-2422.
Open: daily, 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.; closed Monday.
Prices: A full meal is $1.
No credit cards accepted.

Anantashram

I’ve seen lots of eccentric restaurants over the years, but this one deserves a special award. You can’t quite believe it until you experience it. Each diner gets a tiny little marble table and a chair lined up against the wall. When three of us arrived, we pushed our tables together. A waiter — they all walk around barefoot — ran over horrified and pulled them apart carefully, recreating the exact same space as between every other table. Although there appears to be no rule against talking, no one does.

You don’t come to Anantashram, however, to be amused by the seating plan, which dates back to the days when it was the restaurant of a bachelor hotel. This is supposedly the original Bombay restaurant serving coastal cuisine, with its abundant seafood and coconut-based curries. Its specialty is the food of Malvan, an area north of Goa. Until recent years, when Bombay discovered coastal cuisine, its customers were exclusively workers from the coast staying in the neighborhood.

Ordering is easy. When you sit down, you get a thali plate. These are an Indian institution, the original TV dinners, a metal plate that’s an entire meal, with compartments or little cups for each individual dish. In this case, the thali consists of fish, chicken curry overflowing from its metal cup, a big fluffy roti and rice. Then you can supplement the thali from an a la carte menu written in both Hindi and English on a blackboard. Here, the appropriate choice is a curry of tiny prawns in an aromatic coconut sauce.

An added bonus is the neighborhood, called Khotachiwadi. Since this was an area for migrants from the coast near Goa, which was a Portuguese colony, it still has beautiful examples of 100-year-old Portuguese-style wooden houses with latticed balcony railings.

+ Bombay’s original coastal cuisine restaurant — still good.

– It’s hard to take notes when there are no napkins and you’re eating with your fingers. (The dining room has a sink to wash your hands.)

Anantashram,
46 Khotachiwadi, off Jagannath Shanker Sheth Rd. in the Girgaon area of South Bombay (head to the Girgaon Portuguese Church near the Charni Rd. railway station. With your back to the church, walk about 100 meters down Jagannath Shanker Sheth Rd. until you see Golden Wheel Vegetarian Restaurant on the right. Kotachiwadi is across the street to the left).
No telephone. Open: Monday to Friday, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 7 p.m. to 9 p.m., closed Saturdays and Sundays.
Prices: About $2 a person.
No credit cards accepted.

Indigo

Several Bombay residents recommended Indigo to me with basically the same words: “I don’t usually eat in restaurants like this, but …” And after a meal at Indigo, all I can say is: “I don’t usually eat in restaurants like this, but …”

Indigo serves modern, stylish Western food, the kind of food usually accompanied by boutique lettuce and with at least one sauce incorporating pureed roasted red peppers. But there’s a difference here: it’s good, even better than good. I was convinced I had eaten food cooked by a talented Western chef who had taken refuge in India. But the chef is Indian and our waiter told us that he learned Western cooking, of all places, on a cruise ship.

There’s a lot of garish decor in Bombay restaurants that tries to pass as fashionable, but Indigo is truly nice. With pale yellow stucco walls, tile floors, minimal decoration and views out the dining room onto a garden, it’s a world apart from the chaotic life of Bombay.

The menu sounds like a cliched, broken record of stylish Western cuisine, with items such as “grilled, Asian-spiced tuna loin with oven-roasted pineapple and Thai chili vinaigrette.” Except that you get a perfect, thick piece of juicy tuna, seared on the outside and almost raw in the center, made even more attractive by being served on a bed of tiny, garlicky shoestring potatoes and paper-thin slices of sauteed zucchini. And a roasted tomato soup spiced with lemongrass and including shreds of grilled fennel was thick and fragrant.

But I’ll save the most praise for a dessert that would have been a sensation even in a three-star restaurant in France. Each day Indigo has an individual dessert souffle baked to order, and my day it happened to be cappuccino. A perfect souffle the shape of a chef’s hat arrived at the table, uniformly brown on the outside and soft and eggy on the inside. The waiter poked a hole on top and poured in a creamy, cappuccino-flavored sauce. Absolute heaven.

Indigo offers an added bonus. You get a chance to try several different Indian wines by the glass, and the best Indian wines have been growing in stature year after year. If you don’t believe me, order the soft and fruity 2002 Grover La Reserve cabernet-shiraz from vineyards near Bangalore in South India. I’d predict it would finish highly in a blind tasting against Australian competitors.

+ First-rate Western haute cuisine as a welcome pause in a series of Indian meals.

– Nothing bad to say about the food, decor or service.

Indigo,
4 Mandlik Rd., in the Colaba district of South Bombay (Mandlik Rd. is directly behind the main cupola of the Taj Mahal Hotel, running perpendicular to the hotel and the waterfront).
Tel: 91-22-2236-8999.
Open: daily, noon to 3 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m.; open from 12:30 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays.
Prices: Most items about $3 to $8.
Major credit cards accepted.

New Martin’s Hotel Eating House

Goan cuisine, from the former Portuguese enclave on the west coast of India, would be a food photographer’s nightmare. Walk into Martin’s Goan restaurant, for example, and every dish on every table is covered with what appears to be the same thick red sauce. But the dishes are actually strikingly different: Some are very spicy from red chili peppers, some sour from vinegar, others rich from coconut milk. And while it borrows Indian spices, Goan is a very distinctive cuisine, bearing most similarity to Portuguese.

Goan food is a real adventure because nothing tastes quite the way it looks. A perfect example is Martin’s signature dish, “Goan sausage chilly fried,” which is pork sausage taken out of the casing and stir-fried with chilies and onions. When I saw it sitting on a plate, with its thick red sauce containing globules of grease, I wanted to push it aside. But my friend Vikram Doctor kept raving about it, saying he’s tried for years to duplicate it at home, using the same Goan sausage, but could never get it right. I gave it a tentative taste and ended up ordering seconds. This is sausage like nothing you’ve ever eaten before. The meat has been preserved in vinegar, and the sourness of the vinegar combined with the heat of chili peppers makes the sauce irresistible.

Since it’s on the ocean, Goa also makes liberal use of seafood. “Fish curry” turned out to be pan-fried mackerel on one plate and curry sauce (red, of course) on another. The very fresh mackerel was enhanced by being rubbed with chili powder, and the curry sauce exuded coconut. Prawn vindaloo made liberal use of vinegar to create a distinctive sauce.

Martin’s (the “hotel” in its name must be from the distant past) is certainly nothing to look at, however. It consists of five wooden booths, each holding four people, and fluorescent lights reflect their glare on the sauces.

+ Spicy, sauce-laden Goan food with an amazing sausage dish.

– No vegetable has ever crossed Martin’s portal.

New Martin’s Hotel Eating House,
21 Glamour House, Strand Rd., Colaba area of South Bombay (take Arthur Bunder Rd., which runs perpendicular to the water at the south end of the Colaba seafront promenade. Strand Rd. is off to the left about 200 meters down. Martin’s is across from the boarded-up Strand Cinema).
Tel: 91-22-2202-9606.
Open: daily, 11:15 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. to 10:15 p.m.; closed Sundays. Prices: Nothing on the menu is more than $1.
No credit cards accepted.

Oh! Calcutta

When we sat down at Oh! Calcutta to eat Bengali food, my friend said to me, “I hope you like mustard and mustard oil. They’re used as much in Bengali cooking as olive oil is used in Italian cooking.”

Mustard? It shows how little I knew about Indian regional cuisines. Bengali cooking is as far removed from the Punjabi curries we think of as Indian food as it is from wiener schnitzel. The Bengalis have their own preferences. For instance, they love fresh-water fish and turn up their noses at ocean fish. So, although Bombay is on the sea in western India, Oh! Calcutta gets its fish flown in daily from the rivers near Calcutta in the east.

Actually, this fish, called Macher Paturi, was the least of the meal, probably because it was a filet, and fish gets so much of its flavor from the skin and bones. But its preparation was something else: coated with mustard, green chilies and spices and baked in a banana leaf. Forget the fish and give me a spoon for the sauce.

Except for waiters who try too hard to provide attentive service, I’ve got no quarrel with anything at this pleasantly upscale restaurant, with plank floors and whitewashed walls. Big, very fresh prawns were bathed in an enticing, thick sauce of coconut milk, cayenne, bay leaves and the clarified butter, ghee. Vegetables here are a highlight. A dish called mochar ghanto had an exotic taste; it was a mash of banana flowers, potatoes, and an array of Bengali spices. Jhinge posto was mustard heaven: squash and potatoes in an insanely aromatic gravy of poppyseeds, green chilies, onion seeds and mustard seeds.

And there are great desserts, which is a line I’ll wager you’d never thought you’d read in a review of an Indian restaurant. Bengalis are famous for their milk-based sweets, and mercifully these weren’t at all overloaded with sugar. Most interesting was sandesh, a pastry-like wedge of cottage cheese flavored with rosewater.

+ A chance to try Bengali cuisine, which is sadly unappreciated outside of India.

– The waiters don’t let you alone.

Oh! Calcutta,
Rosewood Hotel, Tulsiwadi Lane, Tardeo district of South Bombay (go to Crossroads Shopping Mall. Walk away from the sea for about 10 minutes down Tardeo Rd., the big street that fronts the mall. Turn left when you see Tulsiwadi Lane).
Tel: 91-22-2496-3114.
Open: daily, noon to 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. to midnight.
Prices: Dishes are $1 to $8.
Major credit cards accepted.

Rajdhani

Now we’re going across the country from the fish-loving Bengalis to the vegetable- loving Gujaratis. Gujarat is the coastal state north of Bombay that was recently the site of violent anti-Muslim rioting, but let’s forget that and think about the food, which is a much more pleasant subject. Rajdhani, located on a narrow, bustling street behind a big market, serves up its Gujarati vegetarian cuisine on thali plates. Thalis offer great advantages to visitors unfamiliar with a cuisine: You don’t have to order from a menu. You get to sample a little of everything, even if you’re alone. They’re cheap (in this case $2.70 for both lunch and dinners.) And, for gluttons like myself, you get as many refills as you want for free.

My thali plate had eight foods on it, not counting two chutneys and various Indian breads, making for a sumptuous lunch: cauliflower, broad beans, potatoes, kidney beans, two types of lentils, beet root and a deep-fried corn cake. The only way to describe this lunch is light and aromatic.

Rajdhani is also famous for its barbecued buttermilk (chass). Barbecued buttermilk? You have to be there to believe it. A waiter comes to the table with a plate containing a few hot coals; tosses ginger, garlic and anise onto the coals and covers them with a cup for a minute or two. The smoke-infused spices are then picked out of the coals and placed into the upturned cup, with buttermilk added. It really does end up tasting like barbecued buttermilk.

Unfortunately the “plush coffee house” architects have struck again here, creating a slick room with upholstered booths that has nothing to do with the food being served. They’ve gone so upscale ambiance-wise that there are even cloth napkins.

+ Delicious thali-plate vegetarian meals, offering a chance to sample lots of dishes.

– The staff speaks no English and seem ill-at-ease in the presence of foreigners.

Rajdhani,
361 Sheikh Memon St. (across the street from the clock tower on the front facade of Crawford Market, also called Mahatma Jyotiba Phule Market, look for a walking street with a big blue “Indigo Nation” sign at its entrance. Rajdhani is 50 meters down this street on the right with a big orange sign sticking out).
Tel: 91-22-2342-6919.
Open: daily, 11:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. to 10:30 p.m.; closed Sunday dinner.
Prices: Thali plate is $2.70.
No credit cards accepted.

Jimmy Boy

“Jimmy Boy” is the nickname of the father, but the business is now run by Jimmy Boy’s boy. And the business is a Parsi restaurant, offering the opportunity in this multi-ethnic city to try yet another different cuisine.

The Parsis are Zoroastrians, a religion that worships fire, who came to Bombay from Persia centuries ago to escape persecution. With many of them prospering as traders, they became a wealthy merchant class in Bombay. They’re known also for their love of food; many Indian weddings hire Parsis as caterers. That’s why Jimmy Boy, which caters weddings, offers a “grand wedding feast” on its menu.

You don’t even have to think about what to order here in this bright room with tile walls and high ceilings. Just get the wedding feast, which costs $7.60, and you’re in business. The word feast describes it accurately. The dishes come to the table one at a time, to be spooned onto the banana leaf that serves as a plate. Despite the fact that the food was excellent, we were so full that we had to wave away the last dish untouched, which is something I can’t remember ever doing before.

Parsi cuisine combines Middle Eastern ingredients like lamb and dried fruit with Indian spices, adding to this mix their own preferences, such as a love of eggs. The latter accounts for the pomfret served in an emulsion of egg whites and pureed vegetables (this flavorful white sauce is slightly sweet) and the scrambled eggs (like none you’ve ever tasted before, spiced up with garlic, ginger, green chilies and tomatoes.) Lamb in a sauce featuring dried apricots was very tender, with only a slight underlying sweetness. My favorite dish of the whole feast was a whole fish encased in a puree of coriander and mint and steamed in a banana leaf, so that the flavors of the herbs permeated the flesh.

+ A chance to try the very tasty and distinctive cuisine of the Parsis.

– The food never stops coming.

Jimmy Boy,
11 Bank St., Fort area of South Bombay (one block east of the Bombay Stock Exchange and two blocks south of Horniman Circle).
Tel: 91-22-2270-0880.
Open: daily, 11 a.m. to 11:30 p.m.
Prices: $7.60 for the wedding banquet.
Major credit cards accepted.

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