A Rendezvous at Chowpatty

Today is Muharram. A bank holiday for most of Bombay excepting me! Evenstar has an excellent post on Muharram in Mumbai.

Riddle related to this post: How do you get rid of all the gujaratis in South Mumbai?

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Bomb New Yorkers/Cream Centre on a sunday night!

On monday night, the weekend revelry continued with my friend Natasha of garage sale fame, being with whom is always a party! She is a petite pretty girl/woman - somehow the distinction has no relevance with regard to her - with a splendid sweet laugh and whenever we stop talking, we start laughing!

She was craving fatty greasy food, and first suggested the dosawalla at Gamdevi, specifically at the entrance to the road dividing Fellowship school and August Kranti Maidan down Krishna Sanghi Path. THEN the plan changed to somewhere we could sit and chill. Koyla happened to be closed for renovation so we changed track and stopped by Cream Centre instead. If you live or have been to Mumbai but haven't been to the twin mainstays of Girgaum Chowpatty, New Yorkers and Cream Centre, to savour their fatty, heavenly Western and Indian food respectively, I have no words to describe how sorry I feel for you. Both once owned by the same person, a Punjabi (my fellow Gujarati friends are heartbroken at this information), these two restaurants now offer som common items in their menu, but they remain famous for their original dishes.

Both restaurants are purely vegetarian (I don't think they make use of eggs either), and were the most popular places for birthday parties and raucous get-togethers for decades. I remember the first time I was ever ever allowed to go out alone with my friends on an outing that didn't involve someone's house - I was nearing 11, in the 6th standard and it was the last day of my terminals - after exams we all excitedly ran home, dressed up, imagining ourselves to be trendyy college students, and hurried to New Yorkers for lunch. New Yorkers is most famous for its onion rings, fried and swathed with delicious salty-peppery masala, its cheese nachos - chips swimming in a pool of yellow liquid cheese whose thickness and consistency and smell remains on your fingers for hours after, with a few slices of capsicum scattered and salsa that doesn't take quite like any type of salsa Ive eaten, its American corn cheese balls with ketchup, its delicious pizza with its gujarati sweet/mildly spicy sauce, it's huge Lime Ice soda and Orange soda.... yummmmmmmm...... That's my fixed menu anyway. Some people like teh pasta and enchilada, others prefer the novelty of the HUGE jacket potato.

It was among the first places taht we knew of to offer a sizzling brownie sundae (I'm not a big fan of brownies and overly chocolatey stuff, but I'd have bites) and now it has introduced chocolate fondue!!! But more on that after we praise Cream Centre's food.

We would always order the huge plump samosas, and then the famous chole and bhatura (which Bombay Blue serves in overly sanitised white and blue surroundings, which takes away from the simple middle-class happy dish it is! Chhole is made of chickpeas and potatoes dunked in oil (only in Cream Ctr) and dark brown spices for an earthy taste, and bhatura is a huge puri, fried and about 8 inches in diameter, thick, flaky and soft. Mmmmmm. We don't have anything else so if anyone would like to add their inputs, please feel free to make suggestions!

So we go back to New Yorkers and order their fondue, whichcomes in a little incense-pot-type-dish with chocolate and strawberry biscuit fingers, pickwick type biscuits in vanilla and strawberry, brownies, bread and banana slices. We opt for the banana slices and bread only and send everything else back. The fondue is... interesting... not like melted chocolate and not like hershey's chocolate sauce. It has a slightly thick consistency and doesn't taste like an other kind of chocolate Ive had. By the end, I'm hooked! We ask for spoons and want to eat up the rest of the fondue, but the fear of unwittingly swallowing some breadcrumbs stops me.

We then go outside to the paanwalla who is selling sweet cigarettes, candy variali (anise), bullseyes, jeeragoli, those 50 p. chalky mint tablets and other chooran and assorted relics of childhood canteen memories. And jujubes!!!!! Mmm their squeezy soft gelatinous sugar crystal-coated goodness! We go a bit overboard shopping and suck on the cigarettes, pretending to once again to be children pretending to be grown ups. (I remember we'd try t act like sophisticated movie stars smoking on our Reynolds pens. My ends would be chewed to a plastic pulp).

It's great going back to the places of our childhood. New Yorkers to Sachivalaya was also when I had had my first ever bus ride... when I was 6, and that too on a double decker! I had tripped running up! It was a great experience! It's been said that we turn to childhood places and foods to derive comfort and security of supposedly happier times. Yes I do romanticise the past and a trip to these restaurants, especially with my childhood girlfriends, always cheers me up.

Have a great week!