After three first-time reports from Bombay restaurants (Pradeep’s Gomantak Bhojanalay, Sarangaa, and Maaslli) from my five-week sojourn in the city in March and April of this year, here is the first repeat. As I’ve mentioned before, I eat at Swati Snacks every time I am in Bombay (see my previous reports here and here) and, indeed, I ate at the Tardeo mothership on my second day in the city in March. Two of the students on my program had arrived a few days before the others and I took them along with me to introduce them to this great Bombay institution. I’m glad to report that they enjoyed it very much. Here are some details.
We were there for lunch on a Saturday and so we had to wait. Thankfully, the wait turned out to be quite a bit shorter than had originally been indicated and we were soon seated at one of the four-tops near the kitchen (in all my visits to the restaurant over the years I’ve never once been seated at the other end of the dining room). Everything on the menu was completely new to the students—whose only experience of Indian food till this point had been the North American North Indian all-stars—and so I put together an order of some favourites and some other dishes to give them an idea of Gujarati food of this kind.
We began with an order of pani puri, and I kind of wish I hadn’t. Not because they disliked it—which would have forced me to fail them before the program even began—but because one of them really, really liked it. This started him on a course of eating pani puri on the streets over the next few weeks and that caused some very predictable problems. Next up was an order of sev puri, which was also enjoyed by the young and the not-so-young alike. They were not quite as enthusiastic about the panki with chutney (we got both the regular and the pudina/mint variations) but that was fine as there was more for me. They did like the dabeli a lot, which was good as I’m not a fan of the dish and only got it for them to try. Finally, the satpadi roti (multi-grained roti layered with spices) with gatta nu shaak (chickpea flour dumplings in a thick curry with yogurt).
To wash all this down I got a pudina chhaas (not pictured below) and they got a sugarcane juice and coconut punch.
For a look at everything we ate, launch the slideshow below. Scroll down to see how much it all cost and to see what’s coming next on the food front.
Service was friendly as always, despite how busy they were—and our server took great pleasure as well in these kids’ introduction to this food. I’m sorry to say, however, that while these two liked their meal a lot, Swati Snacks was not as big a hit with this group of students, on the whole, as it had been with the group who’d accompanied me in 2024. A good fraction of this lot seemed to prefer eating avocado toast in snazzy cafes in Bandra to this kind of thing. Ah, youth!
Alright, I did not get back to Swati Snacks on this trip (not least because of faint interest from most of the students) but I did eat another, more excessive vegetarian Gujarati meal a few weeks later. I might report on that next week or I might do one more seafood lunch report. Let’s see how it goes. Before that, however, I’ll have another Twin Cities report (on Thursday rather than Wednesday) and another report each from Seoul and New Jersey.