Flavour of the City

WALK ANYWHERE ON an evening in Mumbai and at some point you will run up against a hawker making plates of small round dried puris layered with bits of boiled potatoes, onions, tomatoes, sweet and sour chutneys, topped with a sprinkling of sev and cori­ander leaves. An item on The Bombay Canteen menu is a different sort of sev puri, as the dish is known. It looks similar but instead of the usual toppings has a ceviche of Red Snapper fish with a raw mango chutney, a form of fusion cuisine but with deeper references built into it. The form is taken and the flavour altered while maintaining what the dish stands for: a quintessential Mumbai fare because the city is also right next to the sea. The Bombay Canteen was the first outlet of Hunger Inc and will celebrate its 10th anniversary next February. It has since remained one of the most popular restaurants in the city, an inevitable presence whenever top lists are drawn. And that, according to executive chef Hussain Shahzad, is because of how they viewed food. Their approach was to focus on flavour profiling rather than traditional recipes. “We identified key flavours of different regions in India. For example, when you think of Maharashtrian cuisine, the first things that come to mind might be coconut, extensive use of chillies and peanuts. We profiled each region of India based on their prima­ry flavours—of fats, acids, proteins, and cooking techniques. We also considered geographical and historical influences on the cuisine. For instance, in Chennai, seafood is prevalent due to its coastal location. Historically, the influence of the Chola and Pandya dynasties, along with Arab traders, introduced spices like black pepper and star anise,” he says. They ques­tioned and understood these influences and then created dish­es rooted in tradition but presented with a new perspective.

Another dish that exemplifies this on The Bombay Canteen menu is a buff tartare. It came from a memory. Shahzad had just taken over in December 2020 as the head chef. He remembered his childhood breakfasts at home in Chennai. His mother would scramble eggs in the meat curry from the night before and serve it with a dosa. To pay a homage to that upbringing, he created the tartare with a garlic podi, a little bit of tamarind, and cured egg yolks. It is served along with just the crispy side of the dosa. “We would (as kids) shower in time to make it to the table just as the dosas were coming off, rather than them sitting on our plate for a while. It was motivation to get out of bed in the mornings. That memory is what that dish is, and it has stayed on the menu ever since 2020 and it’s a top seller.” Tartare is almost raw meat, something that Indians are unused to, but they were willing to push the envelope in challenging diners to open up palates. “If you format dishes right and if you create deliciousness, people will take it,” he says.

Hunger Inc has four other ventures, each markedly differ­ent. There is O Pedro in the business district of Bandra Kurla Complex, a restaurant serving Goan cuisine. You need to be lucky to find a table without a reservation there on weekday afternoons. There is Veronica’s in Bandra West, a hipster sandwich cafe of sorts. They don’t take reservations and there is always a queue of patient customers waiting outside. There is Bombay Sweet Shop that reinvents the Indian mithai through its two stores and a delivery model. The latest, Papa’s, happened in February this year, just above Veronica’s, where four nights a week, a fine-dining tasting menu is on offer for 12 people in the mould of a private dinner party. Bookings must be done on the first of each month for the next month’s slots. Only about 250 customers can be served in a month. On May 1, they got 2,800 calls for June reservations. When Hunger Inc first began with The Bombay Canteen nine years ago, they had about 35 employees, now there are over 400.

Its founders Sameer Seth, CEO, and Yash Bhanage, COO, met at Cornell University while pursuing hospitality manage­ment. Seth had been a banker who had realised he was more interested in the restaurant business. Bhanage, a catering college graduate, had experiences that ranged from being a waiter to a manager of a jazz bar. After they left Cornell, Bhanage moved to Chicago and Seth to New York. It was around 2012 that they first started mulling getting into the business on their own. In New York, Seth was working under chef Floyd Cardoz, a renowned name in the fraternity. Seth says, “We started talking about what do we want to do. We were seeing restaurants in America, and Yash had been in Singapore and Southeast Asia, where they really took local cuisine and reimagined it. There was no such experience or service element in India. That was the idea—to create something like that rooted in India. Both of us also knew neither could cook and it was important people come back because of the taste of the food. We took this idea to Chef Floyd who was my boss at that time in New York. He agreed to come on board as a third co-founder.”

They got much of it right and some of it wrong. A dish that took off in the beginning was a Pork Vindaloo Thepla Taco. The thepla comes from Gujarat and they had flavour profiled it and knew the methi in the thepla worked well with the pork. Pork vindaloo is a dish that came from the Portuguese colonisation of Goa. “We took that pork vindaloo on top of a thepla with a slight amount of pineapple pachadi and crispy fried pork skin. Now, that, to me, doesn’t belong in the Indian cuisine repertoire anywhere as a dish. But as separate components, it’s deeply rooted in the history of this country. As a practical act of flavour profiling in the bite, everything works together. Those were the things that we were trying to achieve,” says Shahzad. On the other hand, the vegetarian version of it was not received as well. Seth says, “A restaurant is only about 50-60 per cent ready the day it opens. You have to continue to keep listening to what guests are saying. Looking back all of us would say our vegetarian menu was not up to the mark. Maybe it was a function of four non-vegetarians deciding the vegetarian menu. Slowly, over the next six to eight months, because we were listening to the feedback, we were able to continuously tweak it and make it more excit­ing.” O Pedro was the second restaurant to open in 2018 and they opted for Goan cuisine. Shahzad was made head chef because Cardoz thought it was the right time for him to helm a restaurant on his own. There was only one problem, he knew nothing about Goan cuisine. “Chef Floyd believed that I could be taught. He trusted me. He was my mentor, my guide, everything for me. I trusted his judgment,” he says. But he needed time to learn. He took eight months off during which he went to Goa, cooked in houses there and made a trip to Portugal where he worked in restaurants. “We were laying the foundation blocks and trying to lay it right. I was going to be the person who would teach a team, lead a team, and nurture that team, I needed to know what I was doing, and hence that training was important,” he says.

After he returned O Pedro opened its doors. The Bombay Canteen has as its inspiration the cuisine of the whole of India, O Pedro’s was specific to one region. Shahzad compares it to a swimming pool versus a bucket but one that was bottomless because of the variety that Goan cuisine offered. For example, it is thought to be non-vegetarian but the state also has a vegetarian Saraswat brahman community with their own food traditions. When it came to the menu, the DNA didn’t change of reimagining the familiar. Goa is famous for its fish curry rice. The opening menu of O Pedro had its own take on it with a ceviche. “Here the fish was raw, cured in fermented coconut and raw mango broth, which are all the traditional things that would otherwise go into a curry. And then the rice was just puffed and put on top for texture,” he says.

HUNGER INC NOW had two popular restaurants in a sector where some estimate failure rates to be as high as 90 per cent. Then Covid happened and they found themselves in the middle of two crises. The first was financial because the first lockdown meant no revenues at all. And then Floyd Cardoz passed away from Covid in March 2020 during the first wave. He was only 59. He had been not just a business partner but a mentor and father figure. “He was always there during difficult times to help us with the right decisions. I don’t think anyone could cook better than him. The loss meant a lot for the business but more than that personally it was a bigger loss for us. We have memories of him in every corner of the restaurant. We miss him every day,” says Bhanage.

When the lockdown eased, they began to find their footing again, relying on home deliveries. There was also time on their hands and Shahzad used it to do experimentation. One of it was to perfect a pastrami, a cured meat, usually of beef but in India with buffalo, that he had been working on for years. He finally got it right, made a sandwich out of it and put it up on Instagram and saw an avalanche of likes. This was the genesis of Veronica’s. They put it on the menu of The Bombay Canteen for home delivery and quickly realised that there was a market. “We sold like crazy,” he says. “The best thing that could travel in those lockdown conditions was a sandwich. So, we made sandwiches that travelled. Then the lockdown ended, and it became an archival folder on my laptop, just sitting there.”

It came out from the folder when they decided to do something to celebrate the memory of Floyd Cardoz. When a bakery down the street where he had grown up in Bandra came in the market, they quickly took it. “We knew there was no other place that this concept would work as well. It’s a thriving neighbourhood, very dynamic, ever evolving, and a lot of people choose to walk in Bandra. So we’re like, ‘Okay, me, Sam, and Yash all live in Bandra. Let’s do it.’ It’s a deep homage to Chef Floyd as well, and his two loves: bread and Indian food,” says Shahzad. The pastrami sandwich remains Veronica’s most popular item.

It was just a few days before the lockdown that the Bombay Sweet Shop came into being. It is an entirely different business, relying on deliveries and gifting, but maintains the signature element of taking familiar food and bringing new experiences into it. For example, a Kaapi Paak, which brings in a note of coffee into the south Indian sweet called Mysore Paak. Or with savouries they took the bhujiya and brought a chilli cheese tang to it. For the future, much of the focus of Hunger Inc is going to be on Bombay Sweet Shop. It is a more scalable business and not limited by geography. The first outlet was in Byculla and last year they opened one in Bandra. “With Bombay Sweet Shop there is an opportunity for real scale to come in because it’s more product focused. It also keeps us on our toes. We love our restaurants. We love spending time and making changes there but you will only affect the 200 people who walk in every day. I will always be limited by the four walls. With Bombay Sweet Shop, the only limitation is how much you can produce. It gives us a supremely future looking business,” says Bhanage.

The story of an onion ring perhaps exemplifies what food stands for to Hunger Inc. Once, Shahzad and Cardoz were at a restaurant called Minetta Tavern in New York when they had an argument about whether there should be onions in a burger. Cardoz was for and Shahzad against it. They ordered one to share and Shahzad took his slice without the onion. The incident was etched in his mind. During the lockdown, they were doing a special menu in honour of the departed chef, and he decided to make a burger and add the onion. In both Veronica’s and O Pedro that burger with a short rib and marrow patty now remains a mainstay. “We put one onion ring in it. One raw onion ring will always be there,” he says.

Bombay CanteenBombay Sweet ShopfoodHunger IncMumbaiO PedrorestaurantsVeronica’s