The Well-Fed Bong

Viator rates the dosa one of the ten things to try before you die . I have my own periodic dosa cravings, but this isn't entirely simple in Mumbai. There's no dearth of options - udipis abound on every street corner peddling dosas and idli any hour of the day that Dhoble allows - but most are not very good. One has to battle a lot of sugared sambar and funny batters before one stumbles upon one that satisfies my Bangalore-honed tastebuds. Rescue, however, is at hand. If you're looking for sambar with bite, idli with fluff, dosa that might bring Rajnikant back to Mumbai and coffee that is not nescafe then the best way South is East. Matunga East, that is. Kings Circle is now called BN Maheshwari Udyan but it is still the birthplace of the Mumbai udipi and the only place in Mumbai to get a dosa fix. For decades, two ornate southern style temples in the vicinity have served as the city's anchor for Tamilians, Kannadigas and various other flavours of southies. The udi...

The Catholics of the western coast sometimes have strange names. Their world is full of elegant names like Braganza or Pereira, but every once in a while slips in a name like Serpis. Situated in Margao's Nuovo Mercado (New Market) is one such name – Jackris. A bakery that's so small it shares its entrance with another stall adorns this name, but the size and odd name belies an outsized reputation. Surrounded by gold shops and barely visible from the street (your best bet is to persuade an old Catholic to hold your hand and lead you there) Jackris is one of Goa's best traditional bakeries. It took me over a decade of trips to Goa to discover it, but it is a discovery. Mince pie, egg puff, bebinca , dodol , pretty much any Goan baked edible is sold here. Everything I tasted can safely be tagged with labels like fabulous or fantastic (even sniffy Catholic aunties award a "very nice"). The good gets elevated to great, while things like doss that I never cared f...

Today I went in search of misal . Misal is as soundly maharashtrian as the pandu, the vada pao, the dabbawallah or the endearing habit of naming everything after Shivaji. No self-respecting station or streetcorner in Mumbai can afford to maintain its status in society without one. I suspect that while pao bhaji is sold to the tourists, Mumbai survives on misal. Even our canteen - which can barely fry an onion - will occasionally serve halfway decent misal (and surprising for so simple a dish, a misal is rather easy to screw up). The name just says “mixed” but such simplicity hides endless variations on the basic aria. The two mixers in the mix are simple – a spicy, watery pea-centric dal called usal and dried fried snacks called farsaan or chiwda. Optionals such as diced onions, pao, dahi, sprouts, aloo are, well, strictly optional. The droolworthiness is in the details – sprouts or spicy potatoes or poha, all kinds of stuff that can be hidden in there. The defining characteristic...

Ninety minutes of start-stop is not exactly geared to improve one’s tastebuds, so it is with some lack of joy (and food) that I approached the dinner party thrown by a very close friend of a very close friend (that, I’ve learned, is the most unavoidable kind – even the end of the universe would have to be considered). But finally it was sighted in the horizon – Acres Club , Chembur. The map below is not just here to compensate for the lack of photos – trust me, you’ll need it. View Larger Map Anyway, interminable brakes and gear changes later, suitably settled into the pleasant divans of the Indian Harvest Restaurant , pacified by a glass of excellent Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc, I was in a more forgiving mood. The venue seemed nice, but call it my snooty-address snobbery – I still wasn’t expecting anything more than chicken-tikka-masala to appear. I just could not think of Chembur rising much above that. Imagine my surprise, then, when the most delectable biriyani appeared. Appar...

I was up in the hills drinking in the scenery, but of course food needed to be on the agenda too. Himachal Pradesh, the land of apples and mushrooms, is a dramatically beautiful state. After a few hours of the flat Punjab plains, twisty roads started spiralling into the heavens pretty much from the instant we crossed the border. Straight-line distances lose their meaning, and the drives (specially if you have a camera) take forever. It seemed only logical that we should be eating Himachali food, but like the aforementioned twisty roads the path to ‘local’ cuisine was anything but straight. The dhabas lining the drive up had proved Himachal to be foodwise quite firmly under the Punjabi thumb (given that it was once part of Punjab, this was hardly unexpected). Enquiries about Himachali food wasn’t met with the most encouraging of responses; one person even told me flatly that there was no such thing – it was all Punjabis anyway. It seemed from where I was standing that Himachalis drank ...

Lucknow's famous kabab's are not easy to get in Mumbai. I've already talked about some restaurants in Lucknow in Mumbai , Lucknow and Smoke and Lucknow Again but a new entrant has now made the list. Of all places, a roadside eatery outside my office catering mainly to Mindspace's call-centre hordes has started selling Kakori kababs and Lucknow-style mutton biriyani (complete with burhani raita and kewra essence). Though its name screams Punjab, it is Lucknow's Kakori Kabab that is given top billling on the menu. The man behind the counter is from Lucknow, and was very enthusiastic when we ordered the Kakori. He even made us sample the biriyani, complete with burhani raita, and showed us the (real, not synthetic) kewra extract that went into it (apparently he puts a little less than normal, because Mumbaikars are not entirely used to the taste). Aroma's (their misspelling, not mine) pretends to be a roadside stall but is actually a counter of the rather aspi...

Walking to the Madh Island ferry one evening, I came upon this brightly lit sweetshop selling red, round pakoras that did not look like anything I'd seen before. The ever-friendly shopkeeper told me they were cabbage pakoras (not the usual cauliflower), and shelling out five rupees made me proud owner of five of those balls. They were very good (why else do you think I'm putting it in my blog?). Its amazing that I've never encountered the putting of cabbage and besan together with some hot oil. And neither, it seems, has anyone else. Unusually enough for something popular, this the only shop in the area that sells these pakoras. And boy are they popular; in the evenings he stretches his operation into a second counter in front of the closed shop next door, frying these balls by the kadhaifull to satisfy a steady stream of hungry Versovians. Who is he? He's Mahiyar Sweets and Snacks, Desi and Bengali Sweets tucked away in a tiny lane in Versova village on the way...

I've already written about my search for Kolkata-style Kati Rolls in Mumbai ; here's the map to help you find them. And lets not forget New York. The Kati Roll Company fuelled many of my parties, while Roomali was a lunch staple. Indian Bread Company served excellent tea along with decent rolls and a was a great place to read books in. Roti Roll's unusual curry fillings filled me out a couple of times while wandering near Columbia.

I've finally discovered nearly the perfect mapping tool for my blogs. Map Channels lets me make these cool interactive maps using Google Maps that I can then embed into my blog. Really cool. I've started adding maps retrospectively - so far these posts have been mapchanneled. Sausages and Smoke Dining with Saint Francis The only downside seems to be that the javascript maps do not get imported into Facebook notes very smoothly. A bit of a pity, that...

Vir Sanghvi has described in his column in yesterday's HT supplement his dining experiences in San Francisco, which got me to thinking. I know San Francisco quite well, having spent generous amounts of time there cycling up hills and running down reviews in the SF Chronicle. Indeed, this blog started four years ago in San Francisco, while I was wondering what to eat and no one had any good advice for me. I''ve just realised, however, that the two reviews written, " Salsa Time " and " Afternoon and tea " are my only two posts in so many years about that city. That put me to wondering... What are my favourite places to eat in San Francisco? Mr Sanghvi had a very different set of choices (some did not even exist when I was there), but below are my Fav Five, rated mostly on the wow factor of the food. This is not intended as a comprehensive list, just a personal list of favourite places to have a meal. #1 Number one is easy - its the pla...

I finally went to the other place - Lazzat-e-Lucknow. It is now no longer on my list of must-tries. I have - it may be officially stated - tried it. I tried, in particular the gilawati (in both kabab and roll versions), the seekh (in the roll version, though I did extract and eat some of the kabab by itself too) and the mutton biriyani. The first thing to notice is that the menu is a lot smaller than Dhuan, no arabic pretensions here but some Punjabi has nevertheless crept in. A single laminated tablemat-size sheet with dogeared edges suffices for the menu. Seating is pleasant, and there's even an AC section for those who can climb the short but steep stairs that characterize Versova's mezanines. Enough of the ambience - here's my view of the food. They don't have kakori. Gilawatis were great, and in particular the paratha (ulta-tawa lucknow style, the menu insisted) that made up the roll was very nice; thin, beautifully non-greasy and quite edible all on its ow...

Everyone raves about food from Lucknow, but in Mumbai its really difficult to find any competent version of it outside the fivestar hotels. The Bandra Copper Chimney and Sun-N-Sand's Kabab Hut were both influenced by Ishtiyaque Qureshi into churning out impeccable nawabi khana, but one has closed and the other, though still serving good stuff, is hardly in the awesome league it once was. Apparently he's still the consultant there but while it has the recipes and techniques, the place lacks the magic. Ishtiyaque Qureshi hasn't quite disappeared from Mumbai, though. He was always around for catering to celebrity weddings and the hallowed environs of CCI, but for the common man he was nearly invisible. Nearly, but not quite - he's been discovered hiding out in the bylanes of Bandra, running a catering and takeaway service called Kakori Hut on tiny Waroda Road. Luckily the food is as great as ever - oh those kakoris, ah that biriyani... You wont find it unless I help yo...

Mumbai isn't quite New York when it comes to writings about restaurants, but there's still a fair amount of discussion on where and what to eat, making it very unlikely that you'll discover something completely unknown to the food paparazzi. It was with some surprise, therefore, that I stumbled upon Farid Seekh Kabab center in a crowded Jogeshwari street. I went past the shop one day, noted the crowds waiting to get in and the smells, and decided to try it out. It turned out to be one of the best seekh kababs in Mumbai - incredibly juicy (you can actually squeeze juice out of it), great taste and dirt cheap. Kabab is the only thing they  do (along with a cholestrol-spiking fried parathas), though they're willing to get you tea and pepsi from the hotel across the street. And people know they're on to a good thing; the place has an assembly line of kababs running continuously on a long charcoal sigdi, and a perpetual line of people waiting. I discovered the se...

There's whole rash of Bengali restaurants in Andheri Lokhandwala, where I stay, so I teamed up with a newly tattooed friend to test their mettle. The restaurants we chose were Hooghli , Hangla's and Calcutta Club . Of these, two (Hoogli and Calcutta Club) are within shouting distance of each other at the end of Oshiwara's restaurant row, while Hanglas is some distance away near Lokhandwala market. (view map) Now the question was how to test. Kosha Manghso, the seminal non-veg dish on a bong menu seemed like ideal to try the taste test. We decided to order a plate of Kosha Mangsho from each of the restaurants, and pair it with homemade luchis . The three deliveries were very interesting in their differences. All looked distinctly different from each other, had different prices and came in different packages. Hangla's medium brown version came in a big foil box and cost Rs 99. Calcutta Club delivered an orange version for Rs 80 while Hooghli was the most expensive -...

Texas is barbecue land, so of course I had to go chasing down some of the real stuff. My first experience of Texas barbecue started with Sonny Bryan's Smokehouse in Dallas, which I was told was famous. One of the eight branches of Sonny Bryan wasn't too far from the office, so I headed there on a hot summer's day. It turned out to be inside a strip mall, looking all the world like takeaway Chinese. The stories on the wall were entertaining but, unfortunately, the barbecue was not much better than ... well ... takeaway Chinese. In short, a washout. I went a few weeks later to Tioga, TX where a Sonny Bryant prodigal started Clark's; the resut is much the same. I discover later that Sonny Bryant is no small operation - its a franchise chain with a CEO. First a bit about Texas barbecue. It's not the regular backyard stuff - here things are very slowly cooked over woodsmoke heat in massive pits. The traditional way is to start with raw meat that's dry-rubbed wi...