North Konkan · Western Coastal Strip
Two distinct eating cultures overlap. One is domestic and communal — a Koli, Agri, East Indian, Bene Israel or Parsi household kitchen with rules about what is cooked on which day. The other is the mill-and-station street kitchen invented in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to feed shift workers standing up, in minutes, for small money. The second is far better known and grew directly out of the first.
Bangda, surmai, paplet or halwa simmered in a ground paste of fresh coconut, red chilli, garlic and coriander seed, soured with kokum and finished thin enough to be poured over rice. No tomato, no onion browning, and it is cooked in under twenty minutes because the fish landed that morning.
Where to try: The koliwada eateries at Versova, Worli and Sassoon Dock.
Fresh Bombay duck pressed in semolina and rice flour with chilli and turmeric and shallow-fried until the crust holds a fish that has almost no structure of its own. The dried version, sukka bombil, is a different food entirely — roasted over a flame and torn into a chutney with garlic and chilli.
Where to try: Fort and Girgaon lunch homes; Sassoon Dock in the morning.
Kokum extract in thin coconut milk with pounded garlic and green chilli, pale pink and served cold at the end of the meal. It is digestive rather than decorative, and a fish thali here is considered unfinished without it.
Country chicken in a thin, fiery gravy built on a garlic-heavy Agri masala with roasted dry coconut, served with rice bhakri. The Agri kitchen uses more garlic and less aromatic spice than any of its neighbours, which is what distinguishes it from the Malvani chicken further south.
Where to try: Agri and koli-style khanavals along the Panvel–Alibag and Uran roads.
Field beans sprouted, skinned and cooked into a loose curry with goda-style spice and coconut. It is the Agri and Kunbi monsoon protein for the weeks when boats are not going out.
Prawns in a red, ajwain-scented batter, deep-fried and served with raw onion and lime. Named for the Sion Koliwada neighbourhood where the preparation was popularised, and now on menus a thousand kilometres away with no idea what a koliwada is.
Salted mackerel rinsed and fried, and pounded dried shrimp with garlic, chilli and a little coconut. Both are monsoon food — what a fishing household eats when the sea is shut.
A spiced potato ball in gram-flour batter inside a split pav with dry garlic chutney and a fried chilli. It was engineered for the mill and station crowds of the 1960s and 1970s — hot food, one hand, no plate, no cutlery, no waiting — and it outlived the mills that created the demand.
Where to try: The stalls outside Dadar and Thane stations, and Aaram near CSMT.
Mixed vegetables mashed on a flat griddle with butter and a distinct blend, eaten with buttered pav. It is generally traced to the mill-district and market food trade, where the unsold vegetables of the day and a griddle already hot were what a cook had to work with at midnight.
The core East Indian Catholic meal — mutton or chicken in a dark curry whose entire character comes from the household's own bottle masala, eaten with fugias, soft fried dough balls leavened with toddy or yeast. Made for feast days, weddings and Christmas rather than for a weekday.
Parsi cooking's two most recognisable plates — mutton with several lentils, vegetables and a sweet-sour spice mix served over browned rice, and pomfret coated in green coconut-coriander chutney and steamed in a banana leaf. Dhansak is not, in Parsi households, a celebration dish; it is traditionally eaten on Sunday and after the fourth day of mourning.
Where to try: Britannia & Co. and the older Irani establishments in Fort and Byculla.
Rice with meat and barberries, and mutton in a sweet-sour tomato gravy under a heap of fried potato straws. The barberry is imported and is the clearest surviving Iranian thread in the Parsi kitchen.
Where to try: Britannia & Co., Ballard Estate.
A Bene Israel offering of roasted flattened rice with grated coconut, sugar, cardamom and fruit, made for the ceremony of thanksgiving and vow-fulfilment addressed to Eliyahu Hannabi, the prophet Elijah. It is food that exists only as part of a liturgy.
Steamed rice-flour dumplings pleated by hand around coconut and jaggery, made in enormous numbers for Ganesh Chaturthi. The count of pleats and the thinness of the skin are the two things a household is judged on.
Rice flatbread patted out by hand and cooked on a griddle, eaten with fish curry or with a vegetable. It is what the coast eats when nobody is watching, and it does not travel because it stiffens within an hour.
A hard-crusted bun split and buttered, dunked in strong sweet Irani chai, and a dense cardamom-scented milk-solid cake from the same counter. The Irani cafe was Bombay's neutral ground — a place with cheap food, marble tables and no rules about who sat where.
Where to try: Kyani & Co., B. Merwan & Co. and Yazdani Bakery.
Staples
Sweets
Street food
Drinks
The food of North Konkan — signature dishes, staples, sweets, street food and where to eat them. (16)