How I learnt to enjoy Gujarati thalis after two decades in Mumbai

• I don’t like eating at Mumbai’s Gujarati thali restaurants as I find the experience too overwhelming
• I love eating home-cooked Gujarati meals though
• This post is about one such meal that I had at the birthday of food writer & consultant Rushina Munshaw Ghildayal
• The food was cooked by the family ‘maharaj’. I loved it

The fact that the dishes served with the thalis are often on the sweeter side does put me off too. I am a Bangal and my ancestors  belong to the erstwhile East Bengal side of undivided India. We do not sweeten our food. Though I must admit that the few thali joint that I have been to in recent years seem to have reduced the sweet quotient in the food they serve. This is the Rajashani influence some say. I have also learnt over time that all Gujarati food is not sweet, just as all Indian food is not spicy.

You could very well argue that I am in a minority in my uneasy relationship with the thali joints of Mumbai. The undeniable truth is that Mumbai’s thali restaurants are very popular among locals as well as tourists and their fans will far outnumber the detractors.

The beauty of home cooked meals

When I was new to Mumbai, the mother of my friends Kinnari and Dhrupal, treated me to a simple Gujarati thali lunch one Sunday afternoon and I had loved that meal too. That was the afternoon when I realised that all Gujarati dals are not sweet unlike what the thali joints I had recently experienced had made me believe. The food she served was so comforting to even my Bengali soul.

When I had a Gujarati thali dinner a few years back at the house of Anaggh Desai, whom I know through my early days on Twitter, I once again came home happy and satiated. The meal was cooked jointly by his wife, his mother and his daughter and was delightful.

These Gujarati meals were far more enjoyable than what I’d ever eaten at Mumbai’s thali restaurants.

Dine with the Munshaws

Shree Chandra Shekhar Mehta, the Maharaj in Rushina’s family, had come to Mumbai from Rajasthan to work as a young boy. He had joined the family around the time when Rushina was born and is in his mid 60s now. Heena aunty herself was a young bride back then. Rushina tells me that her grand-mom had trained the maharaj to ensure that the best quality food came out of the kitchen. During festivals, Rushina’s grandmom would work with the maharaj to lay out the most splendid of meals for the family and their guests. She (her grandmom) is no more but I am sure she would have approved of the birthday feast that the maharaj had cooked up for her beloved granddaughter’s birthday.

When Rushina was a child , her mother would often bring back pickes, spices, sweets and snacks from Ahmedabad to Mumbai. Some of which would be used by the Maharaj while cooking. Things have changed since then. Aunty gets what she needs in Mumbai itself.

The maharaj initially worked with a number of Gujarati houses apart from that of the Munshaws. He had brought some of what he had learnt from their kitchens to that of the Munshaw’s.

The maharaj doesn’t work in multiple houses anymore. He is semi-retired now and works primarily with the Munshaws, especially on important occasions. Which is how we got to taste the elaborate feast made by him on Saturday.

The food was laid out on the table at Heena aunty’s place and we served ourselves unlike in a restaurant where waiters march up to you to ply you and drown you with food. This meant that I could take the food onto my plate as per quantities I was comfortable with and could go back for seconds of whatever I liked (which was pretty much everything).

I did take all the food at one go on my plate and not sequentially. However, once I sat down, I could eat the dishes in whatever order I was comfortable with rather than being guided by what the waiters would be serving, unlike in a restaurant. I had the dhoklas first with the brilliant fried chillies. I next had the thepla (flat breads) with the fried vegetables and drier sabzis. Last was the rice with the liquidy side dishes such as the dal and the kadhi. The sweet dish, a halwa made lauki or gourd, was eaten last.

When I asked the Gujaratis around me, they said that my intuitive order of eating that afternoon more or less mirrored what they would have done too. Rotis first with the stir fried food and then rice with the dals and curries.

My thali at Rushina’s. Clockwise: rice, kadhi, pickles, thepla, lauki halwa, dhokla, vaal dal, kanthol fry, fried beans, sambharyu nu shaak. In case the names are wrong please let me know

What struck me about the meal was that each dish tasted different from each other and left me with distinct memories unlike what happens when I go to thali restaurants when I have no recollection of what I ate once done with the meal. Each dish here was a revelation in fact.

Whether it was the pickle made with mustard paste or the salad made with chopped cucumber and crushed peanuts (similar to something Maharashtrians do), the subtly spiced fried finely chopped French beans, or the Surti sambharyu nu shaak (mixed vegetable such as pearl onions, potatoes, parwal (pointed gourd) and baby brinjals cooked in a grated coconut base), they all spoke to my heart.

The cucumber salad

Finely chopped fried beans

Plethora of pickles

Sambhar yu nu shaak

These pickled chillies were super

I loved the creamy daal made with the flat butter beans called vaal. I’ve had these vaal based daals in Gujarati thaali joints before and in Maharashtrian restaurants too. I’ve found the base there to be very watery and the beans bitter and chalky. The Maharaj’s daal was creamy and the texture of the beans divine. I wouldn’t mind paying and ordering for a plate of this is a restaurant. One of Rushina’s cousins told me that he too feels that most restaurants make a mess of this lentil but that the maharaj does a great job with it.

The daal made with vaal

I liked the kanthol fry which had a tad bitter taste to it just as karela does. I think we call this kaakrol in Bengali. My mother would make them at home but I never touched them there. This I enjoyed.

Kanthol fry

I must make a special mention of the kadhi that I had at the end with rice. It was sweet as kadhis are meant to be. As was it tangy. It had an underlying kick of chilli heat as well. A beautifully complex dish to end the meal with and was possibly one of the best Gujarati kadhis that I’ve had.

Gujurati kadhi

I told Rushina about how I was surprised by the fact that sweetness was not the over-riding taste that the food left in my mouth unlike what one associates with restaurant Gujarati food. Rushina reiterated in response that Gujarati food is not all about sweet flavour notes. That a Gujarati meal is supposed to offer all tastes in one meal…sweet, salt, sour, bitter and heat.

She told me that the dishes that we got to taste were her favourites from the family kitchen and which are now my favourites too. All put together lovingly by her mother and the maharaj who were carrying forward the love of the earlier generations of the Munshaw women. You will find recipes to many of these dishes and the stories associated with them in Rushina’s book, A Pinch of this, A handful of that.

‘The food family portrait’ as I put it: Bloggers and writer, chefs, restaurateurs, TV show hosts whom I have got to know thanks to blogging and who are friends now & from whom I have learnt so much more about the world of food

In the early years of our friendship, Rushina would often pull my legs and say that she would make me eat vegetables. This would bug me at times and I stuck to the company of my meat loving friends. Since then, Rushina herself has made an effort to explore the world of meats and fish even though she comes from a vegetarian family. This is partly thanks to the memories of her father who is no more. He used to travel the world on work and would tell his children to try everything so that they would not be left high and dry if ever in alien lands.

As for me, as I have grown older and have been exposed to new cuisines and dishes thanks to food blogging, I have learnt to appreciate vegetarian dishes too. My lunch everyday is a home cooked vegetarian meal to the extent possible.

My thali, which I wiped clean on Saturday, and the doggy bags that I took home, were my way of telling Rushina on her birthday, “you win and I am happy for both of us.”