Here is my second report on Maaslli, the excellent GSB (Gaud Sarawsat Brahmin) restaurant whose original location turned out to be a 15-minute walk from where I was putting up in Worli for five weeks this spring (if there is such a thing in Bombay). As I noted in my previous report on the restaurant, on two dinners eaten in late-March, right after my arrival in the city, Maaslli, which I selected early on for convenience, turned out to be one of my absolute favourite places to eat in the city. The food is rather rich, with a lot of coconut and coconut oil or ghee in most things, but it is also rather tasty. It gets crowded very fast at peak times but it’s one  of the few places I would happily wait in line for if I needed to. Here now is my report on my third and fourth meals there, both lunches. I took a bunch of my students there for that third meal and the fourth one I ate alone. Both were excellent again. Here are some details.

I’ll describe the lunches separately.

Lunch 1

After seeing the crush at both my dinners, I took no chances at the lunch to which I took my students. There were seven of us and I didn’t want to have to wait an hour. So we arrived just as they opened and got two adjacent 4-tops. We then quickly got down to business. You can take a look at the menu by clicking on the link to my first report above; here is what we ate on this occasion.

Solkadi for me to start, obviously. It pains me to say that, even late in the trip, none of the students had developed a taste for this ambrosia. They drank water. But they loved everything else that followed:

To start we got two orders of their crispy bombil fry, one order of prawn fry and two orders of khubbe wadi (spiced clam cakes). The bombil fry was as excellent as it had been at my second dinner and the prawn fry was tasty as well; but the stars of this opening round were the khubbe wadi. To follow, an order of squid butter garlic with patal polay (the GSB analogue of neer dosa) and an order of Konkani ghee roast with prawns (easier to share than the mutton ghee roast I’d eaten at my first dinner) with rice bhakris. The ghee roast was enjoyed mightily by everyone but it was the butter garlic that the student swooned over (I was a bit shocked to discover that they’d not yet eaten a butter garlic prep anywhere in the city). You might think this was enough food but there was more to come: two orders of the GSB tirphal fish curry with pomfret showed up next with rice and a little bottle of coconut oil from which we were urged to add a few drops onto the curry. This was extremely tasty as well. The savoury dishes then concluded with two vegetarian dishes that I ordered to keep up appearances: aalambi randoi, a GSB-style rich preparation of mushrooms, and usal (mung bean gravy). We got some Konkani vade (puri-like whole grain bread) to eat these with.

Some sweets to close: a couple of order of kharvas (a decadent milk cake made with cow colostrum) and gulab jamuns for those who were put off by the description of the former.

For a look at everything we ate, launch the slideshow below. Scroll down to see how much it all cost and to read about my fourth meal at Maaslli.

The cost of this meal before tip was Rs. 8505 or just below $90 at the current exchange rate. A very good value for 7 people eating this kind of food even in Bombay.

Okay, on to the second lunch. As I said, I was eating solo on this occasion and so could not try as many things. But that’s not to say I didn’t eat more than I should have.

Lunch 2

My last solo meal at Maaslli was also an early lunch. It began with the inevitable tumbler of solkadi and then I got two things that had caught my eye on my first visit but which I had not tried yet. The first was the crab soup. In the US this would be in the chowder genre; it was tangy and utterly excellent and filled with more crab than you would ever see in an American restaurant. I followed this with an order of their stuffed pomfret, which sees a small whole pomfret, stuffed with small prawns, coated with spices and fried. Also just excellent. Frankly, I was already full; but I had ordered some more. Next up was another of their Konkani ghee roasts. I’d eaten the mutton version at my first dinner and the prawn version with my students—on this occasion I got it with mori or baby shark. I think I might have liked this one most of all. I ate it with a bhakri. Now, that should really have been enough but it was going to be my last meal there (we left for Seoul a few days later) and so I did not resist when the server pressed modaks on me. Floating in ghee, these steamed rice flour dumplings stuffed with coconut were delectable.

For a look at this lunch, launch the slideshow below. Scroll down to see how much it cost and to see what’s coming next.

The cost of this meal before tip was Rs. 2168 or just about $23 at the current exchange rate. Yes, I over-ate but it’s still obviously a much better deal when you come with other people.

In sum, I recommend Maaslli highly to anyone interested in eating high quality seafood; it’s another matter that restaurants serving GSB food are thin on the ground in Bombay. I’ll be back for sure on my next visit to the city—there are still a few things on the menu that I need to try.

Alright, if I can manage it with an increasingly packed schedule, I’ll have a Twin Cities report tomorrow (probably in the evening). This will be of a casual Mexican lunch eaten in Minneapolis last week.