Where to find the best seafood in Mumbai

Many of the Mangalorean seafood joints that are fixtures on restaurant guides came up in the 1970s. The stories of the restaurant owners are similar to those of the early Kanara migrants who set up eating establishments in Bombay more than thirty years prior. They too were teenage boys when they arrived in the city where they worked in low-paying jobs, slept in restaurants or offices or in cramped rooms with other single men, got an education in a night school, and where they sweated it up the food chain.

Harishchandra Shetty runs Jai Hind Lunch Home, a chain of six eateries in the city. Ask seafood connoisseurs to rank the crispest bombil fries in the city and Jai Hind is sure to figure on the list. The restaurant was started by Shetty’s father Dasu Shetty, who left Mangalore for Bombay at the age of seventeen. Here, he worked as a mill hand at the erstwhile Jupiter Mills in Lower Parel, and in a khanaval in the neighbourhood. Now, the khanaval was an informal eatery where labourers could get a cheap meal. Khanavals proliferated in the city with the rise of the textile industry that drew labour from the Maharashtrian hinterland and neighbouring states. Many of the early khanavals catered to men of particular castes, the Bhandari mill hand, the Maharashtrian upper caste worker and so on.

Dasu Shetty got a job at a khanaval that operated out of a shed. Mill hands, most of whom were Maharashtrian, paid a monthly fee for daily meals. Shetty said that a building was constructed on the plot in 1978 and Dasu, who had by then taken over the business, was given a space in the redeveloped structure. Thus, Jai Hind Lunch Home was born. In those days, the restaurant served a few Mangalorean staples such as chicken and mutton sukka (a spicy dry or semi-dry preparation with roasted coconut) and fish curry. Shetty joined the business in 1982, the year the trade union leader Datta Samant called a major strike of mill workers. The industry, which had been beleaguered by a long conflict between mill owners and labour unions came to a standstill. As a result, the restaurant suffered the loss of its chief clientele. The cook decided to bolt at this very moment. Shetty was compelled to fill in, and he continued to cook for the next ten years. The decision turned out to be a boon for seafood enthusiasts for his experiments in the kitchen threw up items that are now Jai Hind classics, such as the stuffed bombil, a dish of spicy shrimp wrapped in fried Bombay Duck.

It was only in the 1990s that Jai Hind began acquiring a wider reputation. It coincided with the transformation of Lower Parel from a working class node in the 600 acre swathe of textile mill territory in central Bombay called Girangaon (village of mills in Marathi) to an overgrown thicket of towers. Today, Lower Parel is a cross-hatch of luxurious glass and chrome buildings and chawls, where the families of mill workers continue to live. The view from some of these towers can be disconcerting to those who remember the area’s once-sparse skyline pierced sporadically by mill chimneys. From these windows, the city appears a simulacrum of Kuala Lumpur or Shanghai. It’s only when you descend to the chaos of the street, that you are reassured that you’re in Mumbai.

The transformation came at a cost borne by former mill workers and the city as a whole for it was a particularly gross case of misuse of land. There was more profit for mill owners in their real estate than in reviving their flailing mills. Instead of modernising textile technology, mill owners outsourced textile production to unregulated power loom outfits in smaller towns and declared their mills sick. A combination of government policy favourable to mill owners and corrupt politicians set off a chain of events at the end of which mill workers lost their livelihoods and homes, and acres of land in the heart of the city, which could have been developed in a planned manner, were burdened by a rash of construction. Phoenix Mill, now a popular mall, is perhaps the most notorious case. In 1998, the mill applied for municipal permission to build a bowling alley, a health club and spa for its staff. The bowling alley opened the following year. Of course, the patrons were not mill workers but kids who could afford to pay for indoor entertainment.

A wave of offices inundated Lower Parel after mills began closing down, generating a demand for dining options. Till then, the area had modest lunch homes such as Jai Hind that served homely non-vegetarian grub and places that billed themselves as Hindu hotels, which signified vegetarian food prepared by high caste Hindus. Some have survived the neighbourhood’s aggressive gentrification. Ganpatrao Kadam Marg, a narrow road in Lower Parel flanked on both sides by chawls, has Kamath’s Anand Bhuvan Hindu Hotel, which dates from 1933 and Modern Hindu Hotel, which opened in 1942.

In the 1990s, Shetty introduced Malvani food, which was trendy at the time. The cuisine, he said, is a minor departure from Mangalorean food. The chief difference is that the dry ingredients and shredded coconut that go into Mangalorean masalas are ground just before cooking, whereas the staple Malvani masala powder is prepared in bulk and measured out while cooking. Shetty speaks matter-of-factly about his food, a quality he shares with the other Mangalorean restaurant owners I spoke to. For them, there’s nothing particularly special about the seafood curries, fried fish and neer dosa that make food enthusiasts gush. This is what they eat at home and what they purvey.

Mahendra Karkera, one of the owners of Mahesh Lunch Home, was almost surprised when I asked him questions about his food. Who developed the restaurant’s recipes? Where did he source ingredients from? What kind of chillies did they use? According to Karkera, the restaurant dished out the sort of ordinary grub you would find at any Mangalorean table. It was hardly a talking point. Notwithstanding Karkera’s stoic response, Mahesh Lunch Home offers terrific Mangalorean food. Today, Mahesh Lunch Home is a chain of restaurants that also serves North Indian and Chinese food, and alcohol. But it began modestly in 1977 on Cowasji Patel Road in Fort, from where the flagship continues to run. It was started by Karkera’s father, SC Karkera, who arrived in Bombay as a young teenager. He worked in an office canteen and went to night school, like many of his hometown peers. In fact, Kanara restaurant owners encouraged their staff to attend night school. Karkera senior dropped out of college to work in the accounts department of an advertising agency at Marine Lines before joining his older brother at Jai Bharat Hindu Hotel across what was then known as Victoria Terminus. As the name suggests, it was a vegetarian joint. Eventually, the Karkeras bought Jai Bharat from its Gujarati owner and in 1992, renamed it Shivala. It’s a popular spot among office-goers in the area, including journalists from The Times of India. Both Shivala and Mahesh Lunch Home are named after a Shiv temple in Fort.

Excerpted with permission from ‘In the Beginning there was Bombay Duck: A Food History of Mumbai’ by Pronoti Datta, published by Speaking Tiger Books.