Swotty was our culinary guide for the Reality Tours Food Tour of Mumbai. She said she had just finished her masters in Clinical Psychology. She was looking for a job and this was her breadwinner gig… which she had been doing for three years now.
As a local expert, Swotty took us on a local train out to Chowpatty Beach. The train doors are always left open because the schedule must be kept – 15 seconds at the station platform, no ifs, ands, or delays. So getting in and out at rush hour is particularly difficult when the cars are virtually and perhaps literally overflowing.
Chowpatty Beach is a popular spot for picnics, kite flying, and festivals. A series of food stalls provided our first tastes of street food for the evening. Katie was quite good at taking notes in her notebook and chronicling what we ate. Using her forwarded pages, I’ll try and accurately label the items I snapped as being “insta-worthy.”
And now, Chowpatty Beach is proud to present… my dinner of street snack foods:
First: Pani Puri – fried puff-pastry balls filled with spiced mashed potato and tamarind juice.
Then: Bahi Batata Puri – this was probably my favorite of all we had this night. There’s a yogurt and date sauce that was just marvelously tasty!
Sev Batata Puri – Also delicious with the date sauce, this features rice noodles. We split this. I may be stuffing myself silly but at least I was stuffing myself with others, yeah?
Pav Bhaji is made with tomato, potato, lentils, chickpeas, eggplant, cauliflower, green peas, beet root, carrot and green chiles… basically a whole lot of tastes for a sort of vegan sloppy joe effect.
Capping the food stall visit was the delightful ice cream kulfi — to be honest, this was my go-to dessert in India, and I missed out on various other options… but when this was so good, well… no regrets.
Post kulfi, we grabbed an automated rickshaw/tuck tuck to take us into the Muslim District. This was a hustling, bustling neighborhood of seemingly controlled chaos… which felt like straight up chaos to me. I was glad to have a guide as the crowds, honking, chattering, and general vibe of the place was beyond overwhelming… especially for a guy who sometimes doesn’t love even the smallest of crowds (which I guess would technically be three).
Amidst the cacophony, we found outselves at a slightly off the main thoroughfare joint. Here we sampled the name-not-so-hard-to-remember chicken roll:
as well as fried chicken tikka,
burji,
and chota kabob (water buffalo).
Tasty, all.
We finished the night at the Taj Mahal Ice Cream parlor. It features all natural ice cream with a storied tradition of excellence in the area. I would rank the custard apple tops (it tasted kinda like a caramel apple incarnate… only that’s just the fruit itself and no need to add much to it). As night caps go, that’s a pretty sweet ending.
I was certainly stuffed as I rolled myself into a cab for a ride back to the hotel. This was not so easy a feat given that we had all run the marathon that morning. I strolled the seawall for a bit to help digest the food and to take in the night – fourteen hours earlier I had run this same road at the marathon. It seemed appropriate to come full circle.
