Mumbai’s chefs are confident enough to have fun with their food

I don’t think anyone seriously disputes that Mumbai is now the restaurant capital of India.

Nowhere else in India will you find such great restaurants as Masque and Papa’s doing as well as such high quality but more relaxed places as O Pedro, Americano, The Table Mizu Izakaya and Bandra Born.

 

Often, when I have to go out for dinner in Delhi I struggle to think of places I want to go to. In Mumbai, the opposite is true: there are just too many good options.

 

   Even the best Delhi restaurants now have wonderful Mumbai outposts. Rohit Khattar has brought his restaurants to the city and the Mumbai versions of Indian Accent and Comorin are as good, if not better, than the Delhi originals.

 

   It surprises me how restaurants that I think of as Delhi institutions manage to maintain their high standards outside of the capital.

 

   Indian Accent is not the only example. I have been a fan of Dum Pukth from the time it opened in the late 1980s but I rarely eat at its out-of-town versions on the grounds that there is no point in going to a branch when you have access to the original.

 

   But Mumbai continues to astonish me. I went to the Mumbai Avartana only because my son wanted to try it and was startled to discover that it was in the same league as the Chennai original.

 

   Something similar happened last week when my wife and I took some relatives to the Mumbai Dum Pukth. (Which, like Avartana is at the ITC Maratha) I always judge Dum Pukth-style restaurants on the basis of three dishes: mutton biryani, Kakori Kabab and yellow dal (not the Bukhara black dal that everyone now copies.)

 

   In my experience the ITC restaurants always win because very few other chefs can make good Kakori Kababs (which is why other restaurants urge you to order the easier-to- make galoutis). But even within the limited range of good Kakoris there are technical distinctions: is the kabab soft enough to melt in your mouth but firm enough to travel from the kitchen to your plate without breaking; how thin is the membrane that encases the keema etc.

 

   My second test dish, biryani, is more difficult to judge because even within North India there are so many variations. The Dum Pukth biryani is an ITC creation and should not vary much from branch to branch (the recipe is standardised if secret) but depending on the hand of the chef it often does.

 

   And the yellow dal does not offer chefs the covering fire of lots of dairy products that Dal Bukhara does. It must be substantial but delicately flavoured.

 

   I tried all three dishes at the Mumbai Dum Pukth and found they were nearly in the same league as the great Gulam Qureshi’s cooking at the Delhi original.

 

"It saddens me that there is not one restaurant in Delhi that combines great food with fun in the way that O Pedro does."

   While Mumbai can do all the Delhi dishes well, the converse is not true. There is no proper Delhi equivalent of Gajalee or Trishna. Most people prefer one of these two Mumbai institutions and I have always been a Gajalee fan. The star dish at Gajalee is the fried Bombil. (The fish the British called Bombay Duck.) The Gajalee dish relies on a special blend of masalas and perfect frying. My wife and I slipped into the Ville Parle Gajalee a few days ago and ordered the bombil: one of the few dishes that my wife who usually eats only shellfish and no other seafood, cannot resist. It was brilliant.

 

   There is an unwritten rule that when you go to Gajalee or Trishna you have to order the crab. The craze started with the ready availability of refrigerated farmed crab from South India in Mumbai and the city’s discovery of ‘Chinese’ food. Trishna put Crab Butter Pepper Garlic on the ‘Chinese’ section of its menu and it became a Mumbai classic.

 

   Trishna was always full of tourists sent by concierges from the city’s luxury hotels who liked the crab because a) it was not spicy and b) butter makes everything better. Consequently people-in-the-know would say they preferred the more authentic flavours of Gajalee. And Gajalee would also do the Trishna here-is-the-live-crab-we-will-assassinate-for-you routine.

 

   In recent years however Trishna has had a second coming and a new credibility perhaps because people are less concerned with authentic Malvani/ Mangalore flavours and are willing to accept the right of restaurants to create their own dishes. Serious chefs who would never have admitted to liking a place that was regarded as a tourist trap now rave about Trishna. Masque’s Varun Totani says he goes there several times a month and his own menu includes a riff on the Trishna tandoori crab. The other foodie Varun — Varun Tuli who is a Delhi boy and runs the Yum Yum Cha empire — says that he is fascinated by the composition of Trishna’s Butter Garlic Pepper sauce.

 

   There is nothing like Trishna in Delhi though there is a Michelin-starred Trishna in London. (Different owners and ironically enough the food is actually spicier than the foreigner-friendly Mumbai cuisine.) People have tried to open a Delhi version but it has never worked even though it’s as easy now to access farmed seafood from Kerala and Andhra in Delhi as it is in Mumbai.

 

   Nor does Delhi have a restaurant that is as much fun as O Pedro. When it opened I called it my favourite restaurant (still true) and praised the then mostly unknown chef, Hussain Shahzad.

 

   Hussain’s food was fabulous but what I liked most about it was that, because he is not a Goan, he was able to take a detached view of the cuisine and we had none of that my-grandmother-used-to-make-this-masala nonsense. I wondered what his boss the late Floyd Cardoz, who was a proud Goan, made of this. But obviously he loved it because he once brought Hussain to an event where I was chatting to the chef Mauro Colagreco and introduced Hussain as ‘my successor’.

 

   Hussain is now one of India’s most admired chefs (number one on the Food Superstars list with five stars for his Papa’s restaurant) but even then Floyd and his partners (Sameer Seth and Yash Bhanage of Bombay Canteen fame) let him do this own thing and created a restaurant that was as much a tribute to Mumbai’s Goans (which is what Floyd was) as it was to the Goa of beaches, tourists and the taxi mafia.

 

   I went back last week and was delighted to see that O Pedro had lost none of its charm. Service was friendly without being sycophantic. The menu has evolved since I last went but the food was still very good. I love the Bombay Canteen. But I love O Pedro more.

 

   It saddens me that there is not one restaurant in Delhi that combines great food with fun in the way that O Pedro does. Perhaps that’s the difference between the two cities. Mumbai’s chefs are confident enough to have fun with their food.