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. Continue reading
Category Archives: Bombay/Mumbai
Shree Thaker Bhojanalay (Bombay, April 2026)
Alright, back to Bombay and back to another South Bombay classic: Shree Thaker Bhojanalay. Located in Kalbadevi, Shree Thaker Bhojanalay has been around since 1945 and is famous for its vegetarian Gujarati food served in unlimited thalis. Gujarati restaurant food has a reputation for excess and Shree Thaker Bhojanalay is certainly where you can see that being earned. The large stainless thali that was set down in front of me had 10 bowls on it, which were filled and refilled with various things over the course of the meal; to say nothing of chutneys, fried things and breads that were set down elsewhere on the thali. A constant flow of staff keeps rotating between tables, offering refills and urging customers to eat (though do be mindful of the signs all around the restaurant reminding people not to waste food). A meal here will take at least three years of your life but it’s a delicious way to go. Continue reading
Saayba Hotel (Bombay, April 2026)
Here, just an hour or so before Tuesday comes to a close in southern Minnesota, is this week’s Bombay report. The delay, for a change, is not due to my usual unreliability. I received a new laptop from work today, which meant a period of a few hours when I had no laptop, while data was transferred from the old to the new. Then I had a bit of a nightmare of trying to remember and recover unsaved passwords for a plethora of sites, including this one. And I had to cook dinner. Fascinating, I know; especially as you don’t really care when I post these restaurant reports that are of no utility to you and describe meals in places you are not likely to ever visit. You are welcome. Anyway, we are back in Bombay in April, at a restaurant in Bandra West that most of my friends in the city have not only not eaten at in years, but which most of them were shocked to hear was still in business. Promising, I know, but it was a pretty good meal anyway. Continue reading
Chaitanya II (Bombay, April 2026)
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. Continue reading
Highway Gomantak III (Bombay, April 2026)
I’m still alive. I’ve been exhausted and out of it and also more than a little bit under the weather since I got back from Delhi in the middle of last week. I didn’t end up having the energy to write up the promised weekend restaurant report from New Jersey; and, thanks to some major nasal congestion, did not have the wherewithal to take notes for the usual Monday booze review*. Now that I’m feeling better, here’s a desperate attempt to get the Tuesday report from Bombay out before the day comes to an end. I’ll try to catch up with the New Jersey report before the end of the week—the booze will have to wait till next week (having hit my liver with a lot of high-strength acetaminophen/paracetamol over the weekend, I’m still not drinking). Continue reading
Swati Snacks 3 (Bombay, March 2026)
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. Continue reading
Maaslli I & II (Bombay, March 2026)
The first thing I did after settling into my flat in Bombay in late March was fire up Google Maps to see if there were any interesting restaurants within easy walking range. It turned out there were very few. One, however, caught my eye: Maaslli. I looked it up and discovered that it is a seafood restaurant specializing in the food of the GSB (Gaud Saraswat Brahmin) community—yes, in India even restaurants have caste-specific identities. And all the reviews I read of it were raves. And what’s more, of the two locations the one within 15 minutes walk of me was the original. And so that is where I ate dinner on my first night in Bombay on this trip. And it was such a fantastic meal that I went back there for dinner again a couple of nights later. And then for two lunches later in the trip. Here first is an account of the first two meals—I’ll post a report on the two lunches in a few weeks. Continue reading
Sarangaa (Bombay, April 2026)
Alright we’re back in Bombay. When last seen, I was at Pradeep Gomantak in Fort eating a Goan seafood thali. This week’s report also involves a seafood thali but this report comes to you from Prabhadevi, from a less-storied restaurant than Pradeep. Indeed, until we ate there, neither I nor my dining companion—a long-time resident of the city—had ever heard of it. We had set out to eat Malvani dinner at Chaitanya but had arrived to find a projected wait of 90 minutes or longer. Chaitanya’s food is outstanding but we weren’t about to stand around for 90 minutes. So we checked Google Maps to see what else was around and found another Malvani restaurant, Sarangaa just a few minutes walk away. There was no wait at Sarangaa and so we quickly got down to business. Continue reading
Pradeep Gomantak Bhojanalay + Ideal Corner (Bombay, April 2026)
Call off the celebrations: I’m back.
I was not expecting to be gone this long from the blog when I announced a hiatus in January. My father had just passed away at the end of December and I had come back to Minnesota physically and mentally exhausted. And then the ICE assault on our state began. Even though we were not as badly affected in our town as people were in the Twin Cities, we were not insulated from it. With a low hum of worry at all times—especially for our boys—sitting down to blog in detail about whisky and food was not high on my list of priorities. Especially as I was also teaching and preparing for a 10-week off-campus program in the spring. By the time things eased in Minnesota I was off on that program and that kept me busy (and exhausted) through the first half of June. Through it all I kept meaning to get back to the blog but I couldn’t get the energy together. But I’ve been back now for 10 days and—the World Cup notwithstanding—am trying to get back into my old routines. And so, I’m back. Continue reading
My Best Restaurant Meals of 2024
I began my recap of the 2023 version of this post by noting that we had been literally all over the map that year. Well, in 2024 we did not go to Europe at all (unless you count layovers in airports) but we/I spent even more time outside the United States. Our year began with an off-campus program: I took a bunch of students to Bombay for five weeks before we moved to Seoul for another five weeks. As you might imagine, we ate out a lot in both cities and ate a lot of fantastic food in both cities. On the way back to Minnesota from Seoul we stopped in Delhi for two weeks and ate out quite a bit there too. Then in May I was in New York/New Jersey by myself for a few days before the whole family did a trip to Southern and Northern California together in the second half of June. A long break from travel followed after that till I went off by myself again, this time for two weeks and to Delhi. In between we ate out at our usual weekly clip in the Twin Cities metro. And so there’s a lot of geography to draw on for this year’s top 10 list as well. As I did last year, I’ve tried to manage things a bit by separating more expensive/formal restaurants from more casual places into distinct top 10 lists. This year, however, I’m not doing an overall top 5 list that draws from both; instead each list is ranked rather than presented in chronological order. Continue reading
Some Casual/Street Food (Bombay, Jan-Feb 2024)
Here, finally, is my last food report from our time in Bombay from early January through the first third of February. It’s the only one of my eating-centered reports that is not an account of a single meal or multiple meals eaten at the same restaurant. Instead, this is a compendium of several far more casual meals eaten on the go over the course of our time there. It’s a mix of experiences: quick bites eaten on the street, things eaten as part of food tours, things eaten quickly at casual restaurants. A few of these things were among the best things I ate in the city, but almost all speak to an experience of eating in a city like Bombay that cannot be encapsulated in regular restaurant reviews but which is quite central to not just the story of food in Bombay but to the city’s larger cultural makeup. Continue reading
Slink & Bardot (Bombay, February 2024)
Here, finally, is the long-promised last formal restaurant report from our time in Bombay. We were there from the middle of the first week of January to the middle of the second week of February. There was a lot of eating out, most of which has been chronicled already on the blog. Those who’ve been reading along know that the majority of those meals were in more or less traditional restaurants. The one exception in my reports so far was The Bombay Canteen, where I ate twice. The other was Slink & Bardot, a restaurant in Worli where I also ate dinner twice. This report is on the second meal. Continue reading
At the Sassoon Dock Fish Market (Bombay, January-February 2024)
As my reports from Bombay wind down, I finally have for you a look at the place I went back to more often than any other: the Sassoon Dock fish market in Colaba. At the time that I booked the flat in Colaba in which we lived for five and a half weeks I had not realized that it was so close to one of the city’s premier fish markets. But when I did I was very excited. As it turned out, it was just about a 7 minute walk from our building. Reading up on it, I learned that it’s best to go very early in the day. Thanks to jet lag this was not going to be a problem and so I was there before sunrise on our first morning in the flat. Over the next few weeks I went there a bit later each time, but never very far past sunrise. Predictably, I took a lot of pictures on each visit—both of what I bought each time (we ate a lot of excellent fish and shellfish over our stay) and other things at the market that caught my eye. As being a blogger means being able to inflict your excesses on the world, you too can look at almost all the pictures I took across those visits. You’re welcome! Continue reading
Gajalee, Andheri (Bombay, January 2024)
I’ve reported on a number of Bombay’s premier Malvani and other coastal/seafood restaurants before: Chaitanya, Shri Datta Boarding House, Jai Hind Lunch Home, Highway Gomantak, Mahesh Lunch Home. I am very happy to now add to that list the name of one of the most esteemed of all these restaurants: Gajalee. I’d hoped to eat there much earlier on our trip than we did—the only reason for the delay is that we were based in Colaba and all the branches of Gajalee are further north in the city. And if there’s one thing you don’t want to do after having been Bombay for a few weeks it’s to sit in more traffic than you strictly have to. But when a lunch to thank someone who had helped out with the program in a big way took us all the way to Andheri, Gajalee was an easy call. Continue reading
The Bombay Canteen (Bombay, January 2024)
Our eating out in Bombay was done mostly in places in the more traditional end of the culinary spectrum. Almost all the places we ate at prepare the foods of particular communities in ways that would be instantly recognizable to members of those communities who have never given much, if any, thought to food trends. There were two exceptions in this restaurant itinerary. I’ll post about the second next week. Here now is a very long report on two meals eaten at the first: The Bombay Canteen. We first ate there as a family and then a few weeks later I took the students whose birthdays fell in the Bombay portion of the program we’re on there for a celebratory meal. Both meals were good, on the whole, but one was far superior to the other. Herewith the details. Continue reading
Swati Snacks 2 (Bombay, January 2024)
Okay let’s take a break from seafood restaurants. The weekend’s second Bombay food report (see here for yesterday’s report on Mangalorean seafood lunch in Fort) is of an entirely vegetarian restaurant, the venerable Swati Snacks. I have eaten at their Tardeo mothership on every single trip I’ve made to Bombay as an adult (since 2005) and there was no way I was not going back with the family. The only shocker is that we made only one visit. The main reasons for this are 1) that on account of my regular visits to the fish market in our neighbourhood we were cooking at home a lot; and 2) since we were eating a fair number of meals out every week as part of the program, we didn’t end up eating out so very much more on our own—and so didn’t end up making repeat visits anywhere as a family. This lunch, at any rate, was very good. Continue reading
Mahesh Lunch Home (Bombay, January 2024)
We’ve been in Seoul for just about a week now but the blog is still in Bombay, food-wise. Things got very hectic there towards the end of our five weeks in the city and I’m now two weeks behind with my restaurant reports. When last seen, I was writing up lunch at Chaitanya, a seafood restaurant. Today I have for you a quick report on lunch at another seafood restaurant. But whereas Chaitanya is a Malvani restaurant, today’s review is of a Mangalorean restaurant and one of Bombay’s most famous ones at that: Mahesh Lunch Home. We celebrated the older boy’s 15th birthday at the mothership in Fort. Herewith the details. Continue reading