Eating a Full Meal for $1.29

Usually when I go for cheap fresh Indian food, I go with another Indian person. There are several reasons for this:

1) My Hindi-speaking skills are still terrible, and it seems like at these fast food places, you have to know Hindi. I do know the names of many Mumbai snacks at this point and could probably point at things if I wanted to, but still I feel more comfortable having a Hindi-speaking friend order things for me.

2) The fast food places I’ve been to so far are located in areas where the locals don’t usually see foreigners, so I get more stares than I’m used to. Somehow having at least one person I know with me makes the experience good.

3) Cheap Indian food can be found everywhere in Mumbai. Not all of them are hygienic, so having a friend lead the way is helpful. These types of places most likely aren’t mentioned on the Internet.

Last week, I went to a fast food joint called Bikaner in Vashi (Vashi is located in Navi Mumbai). It looks like every other fast food Indian place I’ve been to:

You know that it’s catered to locals when the menu is written only in Hindi:

As of today, one US dollar is equal to 62 rupees, so you can see above that no item costs more than one US dollar. This is typical of these types of joints. If you get street food (literally an open-air little metal cart on a street), I believe the costs can be even lower.

My family physician ordered a chole bhature and a dahi vada for me. Chole means “chickpeas” and bhature is fried bread made of maida flour; dahi means “yogurt” and vada is a ball of deep-fried black lentils.

The preparation of the chole bhature was interesting. The cook already had a lot of dough balls rolled up and ready to go on a counter. Whenever an order is placed, he just needs to take a dough ball, flatten it out like a pancake with the palm of his hands, and dunk it in a vat full of boiling oil. Tons of little bubbles fizzle on the flattened dough until it pops out into a huge puffy bhature. Here is a picture of the cook pouring more oil onto the bhature to get it to puff out more:

You can see the little dough balls in the top right corner.

Once the bhature was finished, the cook put it on a metal plate along with the chole (chickpea curry), raw onions, and pickled chutney (in red on the left):

Since this joint had no tables, I sat on a ledge along with the other locals. It was my first time eating chole bhature; previously, I’ve eaten chickpea curries with chapatis (Indian flatbread) in my schools, but unfortunately neither the chickpea curries nor the chapatis were tasty. This chole bhature was different; the chole was so much more flavorful and spicy (I almost couldn’t handle the spice, but overall I still liked it because of the superior flavor), and the bhature’s texture and flavor were surprisingly really good. I mention surprising because even though this bhature was dunked in so much oil, it managed to not taste oily. In fact, it tasted very fresh, and the warmth from it being recently fried complemented and mitigated the spice from the chole. Chole bhature is a finger food, so I first put the raw onions in the chickpea curry before ripping up pieces of bhature to scoop up the mixture.

After I finished the chole bhature, I was given the dahi vada:

Unlike the chole bhature, the dahi vada was sitting behind a glass counter, and it was served cold. I’ve had a dahi vada before, so I knew already that I’d like this dish. Basically I like most of the Mumbai street snacks that have sweet yogurt in it. The two vadas had absorbed the sweet yogurt and spices quite well so that they were soft and spongy. I didn’t drink the leftover sweet yogurt because without the vadas, I found it too sweet.

Basically if you want tasty Indian food and could care less about ambience, I’d recommend going to these places. The chole bhature was 30 rupees (US 48 cents) and the dahi vada was 50 rupees (US 81 cents), so it’s quite pocket-friendly. These prices seem pretty typical for this type of joint. Just make sure to go with someone who knows where to go. A friend had informed me that there are many places in Mumbai that are unauthorized, although when I asked him how to figure out if a place is authorized, all he said was, “You can just tell”. Ultimately, the best advice I’ve gotten was to pick a place with a huge crowd because with a fast turnover rate, there is less chance of bacteria growing on food sitting around for too long.