Food eggheads, vloggers, bloggers, journalists and critics often talk about Vada Pav, the quintessential food of Mumbai. I beg to differ. Unlike most of these pundits, I was born in this city along with most of my ancestors and we have little difference of opinion. I want to anoint the simple bhel puri as the ideal Mumbai food, and I have a few reasons for that. At first, having grown up in this city in the 60s and 70s, there was only Batata Vada, and there was no such thing as a Vada Pav. I’m guessing that’s why, although I love roti, I’d rather eat a plate of batata vada with chutney than eat vada pav. But the food that was omnipresent and all-encompassing – Bhel Puri.
What’s more, I lived off Marine Drive and Chowpatty Beach was a hop, skip and a bhel away. For some reason, Bhel Puri became synonymous with Chowpatty or was it the other way around? Chowpatty Beach, dirty as it was, was home to a large number of Bhel Puri stalls. Every afternoon around 3 pm, you could see a sudden increase in activity in the stalls, which appeared deserted for most of the morning. There will be dishes being washed, spices being ground, chutney pots being shaken, heaps of onions, coriander and green chillies being thrashed loudly on wooden planks and general clapping and preparation.
Most of the bhel puris at Chowpatty beach were men with big stomachs, moustaches, whose hair was well-oiled, sporting a short. They belonged to the North and spoke the Bambaiya Bhelpuri version of the Hindi-Bhojpuri-Braj language, and to their ancestors I brought this typical North Indian dish, gave it a Bombay flavor and called it Bhel Puri.
Bhel puri is a kind of chaat, and chaat is one such North Indian thing, after all. Almost every city, district or city of North India like Delhi, Jaipur, Mathura has its own chaat culture. For example, Mathura is famous for samosas, kachoris, jalebis, puris and dabki wale aloo (thin, pieces of potato dipped in spicy gravy). Or Varanasi, where every small street is filled with the scent of incense sticks and puris being cooked in desi ghee. These migrants brought their time-honored tastes and spices and methods to North India, blending them with certain ingredients (flattened puris, thin sev, puffed rice, gathiyas, gram flour and sprouts), undoubtedly finding their origins in Gujarati Farsan. And Mumbai’s very own made Bhel Puri.
Bhel is puffed rice mixed with onions, potatoes and three types of chutneys (green coriander-chilli, red garlic and brown tamarind-jaggery) sprinkled with sev and garnished with lemon juice, spices, coriander and raw mango shavings goes. In the olden days, bhel was always served in cones made from scraps of old newspapers or in torn pages from discarded annual reports. It was much later that paper plates and other such luxuries made their appearance. The same bhel is folded neatly into sev puri or lala puri (without puffed rice) on six puris.
There were two types of vendors in those days, the bhel puri wala and the pani puri wala, and their goods were never mixed. Bhel Puri Wale sold only Bhel Puri and Sev Puri. The pani puri wala sold pani puri (with hollow puris filled with sprouts, potatoes, chilled cumin water) or dahi batata puri, with curd and dahi vada in the mix. Vitthal Bhel Wala, Fort (established in 1875) behind New Empire Cinema, is still famous for its Bhel Puri (they claim it was invented here, but it is apocryphal and neither here nor there). ). Princess Kulfi House on Princess Street was one of the more hygienic places to grab kulfi and sev puri. It was impossible to find a table at Jai Hind Bhel Puri at Nana Chowk. Even the menus of old colonial clubs such as the Cricket Club of India, Bombay Gymkhana and The Willingdon Club include Welsh Rarebit (a hot cheese-based sauce served on slices of toasted bread) and devils with bhel and sev puri. On horseback (stuffed with dates wrapped in cheese and bacon).
Even today one of my favorite things to order at the iconic ‘Sea Lounge’ at the Taj Palace Hotel in Mumbai is Sev Puri. There’s no better feeling than what you get on a rainy day, when you find a window seat in the plush, carpeted, sprawling ‘Sea Lounge’, watching the gray thunder clouds and the waves on the stone walls of Apollo Monkey Was looking , and the Gateway of India was cleared of rain. And, when you order a plate of Sev Puri with a tall glass of vanilla milkshake. After all, what is Bombay without Bhel and Sev Puri.
Kunal Vijaykar is a food writer based in Mumbai. He tweets @kunalvijayakar and can be followed on Instagram @kunalvijayakar. What is the name of his youtube channel? The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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