Joshi Bhojanalay

I've been meaning to write a post about food for a while. It seems that I've finally gotten tired of the canteen food here, so perhaps now is a good time.

As far as the canteen food that I'm sick of - it is actually not bad. There are two canteens, the west canteen looks out over the lawn with the amoeba topiary and is open for lunch except on Sundays, as well as breakfast during the week and tea and tiffin (generally something deep fried in the afternoon and the same as what was for breakfast in the morning). The lunch varies a certain amount, but often includes attempts to create some sort of non-Indian cuisine. East canteen is open for lunch and dinner every day but Sunday, and the food is always the same. It is roughly what people from Maharashtra would eat at home: dal, rice, chapati and some vegetable. It is vaguely spicy, but only very vaguely. For institutional food, it isn't bad, but it is always the same, and eventually almost everyone gets tired of it.

This happened to me, and I've been going to Kailash Parbat more often. It is nice to be a regular at a place like this. When I show up I get a friendly head wobble and last night I heard one waiter tell another, "hey, the cycle guy is here." Even the grumpy head waiter smiles and asks me about my bike. I almost always get a fresh lime soda (lime juice and club soda) and some sort of snack (like Pani Puri - crispy deep fried pockets that one spoons a watery chutney into and eats in one bite) and then a vegetable curry (there are dozens of choices, and everything is vegetarian) and some naan and rice to eat it with. I drink a cup of tea and sit for a while to digest before riding home.

I've also been trying to get a gas canister. My quest for a kitchen pretty much ended when after I had acquired a few basics, I tried to make a cup of tea, and I had exactly enough gas left between two canisters to boil one cup of tea. When Jill came there was a brief flurry of getting a kitchen knife and a frying pan, but getting a new propane canister is not as easy as it should be. I started trying again last Wednesday after Bill and Yuko had people over for dinner and Bill shamed me for being so lazy until he realized that it was not so easy for those who are living in one of the apartments and not the guest house. So in the past week I've spent a total of about two full days waiting around my apartment for the gas delivery tricycle to show up, but they never come when they say they will, or even within an hour or two of this time. So until then, a grilled cheese sandwich remains an unfulfilled longing, and I eat out or go to the canteen.

One of my favorite places to go is Joshi Bhojanalay, aka Friends Union Joshi Club. Places like Joshi's are nestled in corners all around the city, and many are quite old. Joshi's dates back more than a hundred years, and though the owners changed from one family to another at one point during that span of time, the food is still a straightforward Gujarti thali. (Gujart is a state in India, and thali is a style of meal, where a variety of dishes are served together. Ilangovan discovered the place and introduced the current TIFR crowd. (Ilangovan, or IG, is a mathematician of Keralan extraction who has been in Bombay for 18 years and has been my local guide to all of the best restaurants that I have found with the exception of Kailash Parbat. IG also was the one who finally dragged me to a Bollywood movie.) Anyway, IG showew Pranab, and Pranab took several of us there once, and I was hooked. I went there with Jill, Sreekar and the Ducrohets, and have never seen Jill enjoy a meal so thoroughly. Tonight I took Bill and Yuko.

The walk there from the TIFR bus stop is always moderately exciting. After a walk along one of the few relatively unobstructed sidewalks in Mumbai, one must navigate the big open place where traffic crosses haphazardly and various construction projects are underway - in other places one might call it a square - by Metro cinema, and this is always interesting. And the street between there and Joshi's is one way unless you are a bus or a pedestrian (or six pedestrians pushing a handcart twice the size of a car), which makes for interesting navigation. It is also perpetually heavily under construction. But eventually, one makes it to the arched entrance leading to the courtyard and the stairs leading up to the restaurant on the first floor. This is truly not the sort of place that can be found without a local guide.

Upon entering Joshi's, one sits down at one of the two-seat tables. One side of each table is open to the aisle where the waiters circulate. First, they bring a cucumber and tomato salad, raw red onion, small green chiles, a little bit of mango pickle, and scoop each of a red and a green spicy condiment. Then come buttermilk and water to drink. There is a choice of two dals, one sweeter than the other, or a sweet yogurt or coconut based dish. Usually, they give me all three, because I don't seem to be able to pick one fast enough. After this, the specific menu changes with the days of the week. On the day I went with Jill, Sreekar and the Ducrohets, we got a little fried ball with stuff inside and some sauce to go with it. It was quite tasty, and I think Jill had three or four by the time the meal was done. The dry vegetable was a wonderfully spiced cabbage and green pea thing, and then there was an aloo palak, some bright green stuff, and a paneer in curry. Crisp papad goes well with the spicy chutneys that come with the salad at the beginning. The roti guy came around with his ghee-drizzled disks, regular chapathi and the kind with a tumeric yellow tint. There were the hard, cookie like biscuits and a darker puffy roti, spiced with some combination that didn't get a chance to be critically examined before being consumed. Then the sweet nutty yogurt sauce came out. Jill liked this one. I turned to ask her what she thought of the place and she bubbled, "I keep going from this green one (the condiment that came with the salad and onion) to this white one (the sweet nutty yogurt sauce). The spicy one is so good, but it hurts, and then this one makes it better, but then I want the spicy one again..." Her eyes glazed over and she reached for another morsel of delicious fried thing with stuff inside.

A thali at Joshi's is a proper Indian meal, and most of the eating is done sans utensils. The rotis are torn into small pieces and used to scoop up the other foods. After a bit of practice, I am able to do this without making much of a mess, but there is a learning curve, during which the sauce often makes it well past the first knuckles. Especially in the south, rice is also eaten with the fingers, after adding just enough dal or curry so that it sticks together. I've tried this a few times, but doing it generally leads to a big mess, and I prefer to use utensils. There is a sensuality to eating with one's fingers that is missed when food is mediated by spoon and fork. Like the cacophony of spice that goes into most Indian meals, it isn't something that I want to have all the time, having not grown up eating like this, it is a bit overwhelming to have every meal be so intense. But the experience of eating a good thali like at Joshi's is one of the acmes of food experiences.