People new to Mumbai complain about a lot of things: the masala-scented humidity, the local trains doubling as pressure cookers, the monsoons that turn roads into rivers, and of course, the fact that you’re always standing in a queue – sometimes for no reason at all. But if there’s one area where Mumbai wipes the floor with every other Indian city, it’s food. Pure, glorious, artery-clogging yet soul-healing food.
No matter where you are in the city—be it a shady bylane behind a godown or the air-conditioned heart of a glass tower—food is never more than a few hundred steps away. And we’re not just talking about vadapavs and cutting chais. From Andhra meals to Bengali mishti doi, from Rajasthani dal-baati to Tamilian pongal, Mumbai’s got a culinary version of pan-India unity that even the Parliament can’t muster.
The city’s secret? It adapts and adopts. It welcomes cuisines from across the country and globe, then remixes them to suit the local palate – read: add spices, fry twice, and put on dollops of mayo or cheese.
The Three-Tiered Mumbai Meal System
Mumbai has a hierarchy of food related offerings, much like Maslow’s Pyramid. Each of these tiers cater to specific clientele – grouped typically by the strength of their wallet lining, or at times, the strength of the stomach lining.
Tier 1: The Rekdi Row
These are the cheapest of the lot – the khau-gallis—narrow food alleys, often popping up outside railway stations, college gates, or government offices (basically, wherever hungry humans are found). Every stall serves something different—pav bhaji, sev puri, frankies, Chinese, juice, you name it. The turnaround time? Record-breaking. Seats? Optional. The hygiene? Let’s just say what you don’t know can’t hurt you. Michelin who?
Tier 2: The Budget Bites
This includes your classic Udupi joints, Irani cafés, and other hole-in-the-wall eateries that serve you food without bankrupting you. You can sit, you can breathe, and if you’re lucky, you can even finish your meal before the waiter starts hovering with the bill like an eviction notice. Compare to the rekdis, you’re still expected to eat fast and leave faster, but at least you’re seated while doing so.
Tier 3: The Fine-Dining Scene
This is for those evenings when you’re feeling rich—or pretending to be. Plush interiors, menus with a summarized version of the recipe under each item, and enough cutlery to build a small temple. These meals stretch over hours, as do the bills.
Now, while these tiers cater to every wallet size and stomach capacity, there’s one special cuisine that unites them all. No, not biryani. Not even pav bhaji. I’m talking about the one cuisine that’s sneakily infiltrated every neighbourhood, social group, and class in the city.
Hindi-Chini Bhai-Bhai
Indian Chinese food. A culinary crossover so wildly successful, it deserves its own embassy.
No matter how complex the relationship is between the two nations, Mumbaikars will always adore and enjoy what it knows to be Chinese food. It doesn’t matter who you are – student celebrating his first date, office-goer on a lunch break, or a housing society aunty planning her kitty party catering – Indian Chinese works for everyone. The elite sip their sweet corn soup in five-star restaurants. The rest of us queue up at stalls coloured bright red with paint stolen from the headquarters of the CCP.
These mobile Chinese stalls are easy to spot: always red, always with dragons or lanterns, and always with names like Dragon Flame, China Spice, or the mildly ominous Wok of Death, written in yellow Oriental typeface. And let’s be honest, given their ubiquity, you’ve always suspected that they might be secret surveillance outposts of the Chinese government. No one’s checking, but all evidence points to highly probable.
Do they serve authentic Chinese? Absolutely not. Do we care? Absolutely not.
The chef is usually a smiling Nepali or North-Eastern migrant who can do with a wok what Zakir Hussain can do with a tabla. His assistant – a future chef in training – cleans tables, fills water bottles, wipes plates, delivers orders, and sometimes even takes phone calls. The service is lightning fast. The rice and noodles are pre-boiled and ready; it’s just a matter of tossing, stirring, splashing soya sauce like holy water, and serving it steaming hot in a plastic plate or packed into containers to devour at home. As the teen chef brings you your order, the wok has already been perfunctorily cleaned before mixing up the next batch of noodles or rice.
Authenticity be damned—this is Indian Chinese, where:
- Hakka noodles have never met Hakka,
- Schezwan sauce comes from a secret bunker under Malad,
- And Manchurian is basically bhajiya in disguise, now with soy sauce.
Each dish is basically a matrix of two main variables—rice or noodles—tossed around in either Hakka or Schezwan style. The Schezwan, of course, is spicier and redder than a sunburnt tomato, while Hakka is the subtler cousin that pretends to be cultured but still throws a punch of garlic when needed.
And no Chinese menu is complete without that mandatory question:
“Dry or with gravy, sir?”
This question is sacred. The chef won’t touch the wok until this decision is made.
- “One Manchurian.”
“Dry or with gravy, sir?” - “One Hakka noodles.”
“Dry or with gravy, sir?” - “One Manchow soup.”
“Dry or with gravy, sir?” (Wait, what?)
Add a vegetarian/non-vegetarian variation to this mix, and voila—you’ve unlocked countless permutations in your menu on a 4×3-foot cart.
But wait, we didn’t stop there. We’ve gone one step further and created Chinese dishes that even Confucius wouldn’t recognise. Case in point: Gobi Manchurian. There’s nothing Chinese about it – unless you count the Gobi desert, and even that’s stretching it. Then there’s Triple Schezwan Fried Rice, an unholy trinity of rice, noodles, and gravy packed together like a desi Chinese thali. Sun Tzu never mentioned this in The Art of War, but if he’d tasted it, he’d have named a chapter in his book after this dish.
God forbid someday a real Chinese diplomat ever stumbled upon one of these stalls, they’d probably consider it a culinary war crime. Or worse—ban all exports to India.