What do I love sharing most about on Google Maps ???
It actually could be a lot of things but something that comes very instinctively and naturally to me is about food and restaurants. Yupe !!! I am a foodie at heart and use food as entertainment and not just as fuel or nutrition.
For me Punjabi, Mughlai and chaat restaurants are my favourite goto places for a scrumptious meal as I relish these type of North Indian dishes. In fact this also happens to be the best loved cuisine in India today. The Punjabi and Mughlai food is creamy and delectable. The use of cream, milk and butter in the curries with saffron and dry fruits make it rich and heavy. The extensive vegetarian and chicken dishes are steeped into these buttery sauces which are made from a variety of aromatic spices. And you know that you are in the right place with places like Punjab Grill, Oye Kake, Copper Chimney, Pratap Ka Dhaba, Spice Klub or an Urban Tadka.
Being born and brought up in Mumbai I wasn’t always a food addict as this place had very little to offer in my growing up years. It was always known as the “financial capital” of India and the “city of dreams”. But about a decade or so ago the food scene exploded and Mumbai also got the title of “India’s Restaurant Capital” !!!
Now whether it was a genre-defining restaurant with the likes of ‘The Bombay Canteen’ or the genre-defying cooking, Mumbai was toying with flavours and formats that where transforming India’s food landscape. A visitor to Mumbai today is spoilt for choices, and there is a resonating energy to the city’s culinary scene, a sense that a chef can do anything and the only rule is to have “courage”.
A list of trailblazing restaurants in Mumbai suddenly exploded. Mumbai’s complete food revolution was created by a handful of young Indians who studied and worked internationally and chose to come back to India to pursue their dreams, and where in India but in the “city of dreams” ? For a young chef returning to India, Mumbai felt far removed from the provincialism of Delhi, a place with the energy and vibrancy of a New York or London but quintessentially Indian. This is where Mumbai’s intrinsically cosmopolitan culture made all the difference.
There has never been a moment where one Indian city attracted such a constellation of culinary stars in such a short period of time. In less than five years, food in Mumbai and across India has been reinvented and transformed. Food became an art form, a means of creative expression. The best food will always emerge in places that are open to new ideas, new thoughts—places that celebrate diversity and freedom.
And for you to picturize my point of view let me show you a few clicks of my favorite chaat called the pani puri or the golgappa and its phenomenal transformation through the last few years.
I have grown up eating this dish. Literally anytime we had a family outing this is one of the chaat items on the list of to have.
The above is the traditional dish of pani puri that was served for years and years together.
But now we have the concept of “deconstructing your pani puri” at a place called the SpiceKlub with the item in the menu as “Gastro Pani Puri”
It is like going back to your chemistry lab, except this time, it’s going to be a lot more gluttony and fun. The little bites of happiness are served with mint water in a test tube and sweet & tangy chutney in an inject-able syringe !!! Be rest assured, the glamour of it does not change the taste of Mumbai’s beloved chaat item.
The story for this awesome item does not end here. Take a look at the various variations this dish has got:
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Pani Puri Shots
The spiced up pani served in individual shot glass covered with the puris.
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Spicy Flavored Pani Puri
You can choose from spicy to sweet flavors of pani to satiate your taste buds.
And my all time favorite is the
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Vodka Pani Puri
This is the traditional pani puri with a shot of Vodka in the spiced up herb water.
In fact the taste of the spiced up herb pani completely engulfs the taste of alcohol and you can hardly taste the Vodka.
Eating out become a completely different experience in itself. As one says “variety is the spice of life” and this is certainly true for the explosive food craft being witnessed in Mumbai. And Google’s LG platform has added fuel to this explosive growth. I have been actively putting in updates on the LG platform to share my pleasure about these new age restaurants. This not only gives a lot of visibility to the chef and the restaurant to innovate even more, but also helps me build a list of my go-to places. So the next time someone asks me for a nice place to go to, I just need to look up my Google Maps and share my review with them.
And just before I sign out of this post, the next time you are in Mumbai, drop me a line and I will be more than happy to be your “Local Guide” 