Here is this week’s Bombay restaurant report, only four days late. My last report from Bombay featured a return—to Highway Gomantak in Bandra—and so does this one. In this case I’m back to Chaitanya in Prabhadevi, the iconic Malvani restaurant that is at the top of many people’s lists of the best seafood restaurants in the city.

You may recall that a friend and I tried to eat dinner at Chaitanya on a Sunday night earlier on this trip. Rebuffed by a likely 90 minute wait, we’d ended eating a pretty good Malvani meal at Sarangaa, not too far away. But after my excellent lunch here in 2024, I knew I was going back for sure; it came to pass for an early lunch towards the end of the trip. I took a few of my students with me. We arrived just as they opened for lunch and had no trouble getting a table. It was another excellent meal; here’s how it went.

We were a party of four and got a table in the smaller dining room on the right. We got down to business right away with some cooling drinks. Two of the students got fresh lime sodas, one got a kokum soda, I—of course—got a tumbler of solkadi. Thus fortified, we made decisions about food.

I recommended that everyone get a thali of their choice. But it would have been rash to not also get some other goodies to share. The students voted for crab lollypops to start. I added orders of tisrya bhujna (clams stir-fried with coconut etc.) and prawns butter-garlic (with a plate of ghavne for mopping them up). The lollypops were fine and the butter-garlic was very good (especially with the perfect ghavne—a relative of the neer dosa); but the tisrya bhujna was outstanding.

As we worked our way through the above, our thalis began to arrive. Two of the students got the pomfret and surmai thalis, resepectively; I got the halwa/black pomfret thali; the third student got the mutton thali. Us fish types got rice bhakris with our thalis, the meat eater got his with vade (the multi-grain poori-like bread). The fish thalis included large, perfectly-fried pieces of the centerpiece fish, a curry with coconut milk with a piece of mackerel in it and zavla (dry-fry) with dried prawns. The meat thali additionally had a rich mutton sukka, chicken curry and another bowl of meat gravy/curry. All the thalis included bowls of solkadi, which meant even more for me—I think I’ve mentioned that not one of my students developed a taste for solkadi over their five weeks in Bombay. Ah, the young!

Oh yes, they had aamras for dessert, made with kesar mangoes and we each got a bowl and went throught it at alarming speed.

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.

Service was friendly and helpful. Cost? Rs. 5753 or $60 at the current exchange rate. $15/head is not a cheap meal by any standard in Bombay. But do keep in mind that we ordered rather a lot. At any rate, coming from the US it remains an excellent deal for the quality of the fish (to say nothing of the rest of the meal).

Alright, I’ll have another Bombay report on Tuesday. We might go somewhere new for that. Before that, a report of dinner in Newark last October will go up tomorrow. And a booze review on Monday. That’s the plan anyway.