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
Tag Archives: Malvani Cuisine
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
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
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
Chaitanya (Bombay, January 2024)
Alright, let’s keep cranking the Bombay restaurant reports out. Here is another lunch eaten at one of the city’s stalwart Malvani restaurants: Chaitanya. You might remember that my second report from this trip was of a very good lunch at Shri Datta Boarding in Lalbaug. Well, not that there’s a competition but I would say that this lunch at Chaitanya was even better. I took a subset of my students there after a morning outing a few weeks ago and between us we tried a large number of their seafood thalis and also a veg thali. There wasn’t a single less than deeply-satisfied customer in the bunch. Herewith the details. Continue reading
Shri Datta Boarding House (Bombay, January 2024)
I’m in danger of falling way behind on my Bombay food reports. Those of you who follow me on Instagram are aware of most of my food-related activity: from fish markets to takeout to restaurants to street food. On the blog, however, I’ve only posted a report on our lunch at Soam more than a week ago. This is because the program I’m leading here has kept me insanely busy. This is all my own fault as I’ve over-scheduled us more than a little; it’s all been fun and interesting but the pace has also been intense. The program activities themselves, unsurprisingly, involve food. Here now is a brief look at the second meal we ate out together, just a few days after our welcome lunch at Soam. It features one of the cuisines I most love eating when in Bombay: Malvani. Continue reading
Jai Hind Lunch Home (Bombay, December 2018)
The food of the southwestern coast of India is something I had almost no sense of when I was growing up in India. I grew up all over India but, other than brief visits to Goa, never went further south than Hyderabad; and as an adult I didn’t spend much time in Bombay till after I’d left India for the US. It wasn’t until I ate at Swagath in Delhi in the early 2000s that I realized just how different the cuisine of coastal Karnataka, particularly Mangalore, and of the adjoining Konkan coast is from the South Indian cuisines I was more familiar with. And I just loved it. But as good as Swagath was in its heyday, its food cannot compare to what is available in Bombay—which makes sense as the cuisine is both seafood-heavy and because Bombay, due to proximity, is chock-full of people from those parts of the country. As a result, whenever I am in Bombay I try to eat at at least one restaurant that specializes in Mangalorean/Konkani/Malvani cuisines. On this trip Jai Hind Lunch Home was my first such stop. Continue reading