Does Mumbai need a SodaBottleOpenerWala?

Warning: Long post ahead

There was a restaurant called Jumjoji which had opened sometime back in Bandra Reclamation and they served Parsi food.

I was one of those who had said then that
to get the real experience of Irani cafes and Parsi food one should make the
trek to South Mumbai and to its heritage Irani restaurants. An experience which a
Jumjoji could not recreate I felt.

I did go to Jumjoji eventually and wrote about it here. I kept comparing it in my head with the Irani cafes of South Mumbai rather than
enjoy it in isolation. The experience wasn’t too bad though we never went back
to it for some reason and I heard that its now shut.

A few years back, an agency designing a
restaurant in London got in touch to me requesting my permission to borrow a
few Irani café stories from my blog. They said they were designing plates to put in an Irani café themed restaurant in London and wanted the stories for that.

Turned out that this restaurant was the
Mumbai and Irani café themed Dishoom which since then has become a runaway hit
in London.

When I read about Dishoom, I began to wish
that someone would set up a restaurant like that in Mumbai which paid homage to
the city’s food history.

Then A D Singh’s  SodaBottleOpenerWala opened with its
Irani café Mumbai theme in India.

It opened in Gurgaon, and then Delhi though, and not in
Mumbai. I went to the Delhi outlet and had a really nice time and wished we had
one in Mumbai. You can read about my experience of the Delhi outlet here.

SodaBottleOpenerWala then travelled to
Bengaluru and Hyderabad but eluded us in Mumbai.

Well, SodaBottleOpenerWala has finally come
to town and opened in Bandra Kurla Complex’s Capital Building yesterday. We went for a media
preview the previous week.

The restaurant is fairly spacious by Mumbai
standards. The design beautifully recreates the spirit of Mumbai’s Irani cafes
and pays homage to the Parsi community too by placing a bike at the gate. 

All
Parsis love their two wheelers after all.

 

Irani cafe wall art

So why would you choose a
SodaBottleOpenerWala in Mumbai when there is a Britannia, Idea Corner, Jimmy Boy or
Merwan or Yazdani?

SodaBottleOpenerWala will work for you if
you don’t want to travel to South Mumbai. If you want to eat in a large, clean place
with air-conditioning, with valet parking AND loos. If you want to have a drink
with your meal. Or want to go out for dinner dinner and not just lunch.

SodaBottleOpnerWala is bigger than most Irani cafes barring perhaps Britannia Unlike Britannia it has air-conditioning, alcohol, loos and is open at night and on Sundays

Jimmy Boy and possibly Paradise are
possibly the only Irani cafes open at night. Most Irani Cafes are largely non-airconditioned. They rarely have clean loos if they have them to start with. 

Food in most Irani Cafes are fairly cheap though except in Britannia.

I don’t have an idea about the SodaBottle pricing as it was a preview but I don’t think Delhi was too expensive.

Also here’s the thing. Unlike what its name
and Irani café theme might make you believe, SodaBottleOpenerWala is not just
about Parsi food. It has got a number of iconic Mumbai dishes here and is
possibly more Mumbaiyya in its DNA than Bombay Canteen which was arguably the
first restaurant to make Indian food trendy and sexy for the younger Mumbai dining audience.

SodaBottleOpenerWala is not run by Parsis.
It is owned by restaurateur A D Singh, who disarmingly refused to take any
credit when I complimented him on the product.

He was being modest though because he was
after all the one who appointed Mohit Balachandra as the captain of the team running it. 

I first knew
Mohit as someone who writes the blog Chowder
Singh which celebrates Indian food, and became friends with him. I later got to know
that he works with AD. I have had many great food outings with Mohit and fully
trust his food sensibilities. 

They do have a couple of young Parsi chefs in the
team. Anahita Dhondy in Delhi and Darius Madon in Mumbai.

I had eaten the SodaBottle food in Delhi
and had largely liked it.

This time we tried the food in the preview in mumbai and a different set of dishes from what I ate in Delhi. 

The food was served as plated normally but of
course you can’t take responses to a preview meal as a ‘review’ but I still
thought I will share how I found it.

The Goan sausage (see what I meant about
‘Mumbai’ and not just Parsi) was not too tart. I asked if these were rosary
sausages and turned out they are. So not as tangy, thankfully, as the
commercial ones. Just a couple of days back K made the rosary sausages we had
got from Goa and the Sodabottle ones reminded me of them. The sausages were served with pao,
which are made in house and are pretty nice and soft and much better than the
ones served in Delhi. They apply butter on the bun  though which is redundant when served with
sausages I feel and you should ask them to skip that.

I was skeptical when I tried the Bhendi
Bazar sheekh parathas. Would they be as good as Hai Tikka in Bhendi Bazar?

Mohit told me that
he had eaten at Do Tanki in Bhendi bazar and not at Haji Tikka. Do Tanki was a
bit disappointing actually IMO with its dry and chewy sheekhs and you can read about it in my post here. 

The sheekhs at SodaBottleOpenerWala  though were brilliantly juicy, meaty and right up to Haji
Tikka standards and way better than what I remember of Do Tanki.

Do watch this video on The Finely Chopped
to know more about Haji Tikka and please subscribe to the channel.

We then tried the tareli machhi, which
means fried fish in Parsi. Parsi love seafood. 

They use rawas at SodaBottle and bake the fish instead of
frying it. The girls at the table, K and my blogger friend, Amrita of Life Ki Recipe, loved it. 

The fish was well spiced but I found it a bit too chunky as I am not too fond of
grilled rawas.

The chicken cutlet pav was pretty good…the
cutlet was flavour packed and yet not spicy. Nor was the chicken chewy.
However, as K pointed out, Parsi cutlets are flat while this was round like a batata vada.

For the mains we tried the badami alu made
with potatoes in a sauce based on the paste of cashews and ground coconut. 

The sauce was creamy and heavenly
and reminded me of the Parsi cashew chicken of my mom in law that I loved.
There was a green chilli in it and chewing on it added to the experience thanks
to the contrasting heaty and mellow flavours.

The sali mutton was pretty good as the
mutton was tender, the sauce not too sweet. Just wished they had added some
more sali (potato sticks).

We had the prawn patia, which K’s granny
used to love. The sauce had a nice pickle-like pungency to it. The difference
from the patia in a Parsi house and the one at SodaBottle was that the prawns
were juicy here and not over-cooked.

We ended our meal with the mutton berry
pulao made famous by Britannia. Except the rice is not soggy at SodaBottle and
nor is the pulao too greasy and I preferred this to the over-priced and over-hyped
one at Britannia. But then you would go to Britannia to chat with grandpa Boman
Kohinoor more than anything else (check this
link on him).

I did not have the dhansak that night but liked it
when I had it in Delhi. Chef Anahita’s mom supplies the Parsi spices I am told and
there is a fair bit of variance in dhansaks across Parsi families and
restaurants as I have seen over the years. I had the eggs kejriwal in
Delhi. It is closer to the RBYC version at SodaBottle than the one at Bombay Canteen but has
mushrooms and the chillies are not visible.

I am trying to avoid desserts these days
but if you try them, the mava cake (regular not the  multigrain one) and Toblerone
mousse (if you like dark chocolate) are good options. 

The laganu custard was
not firm enough and was rejected by our table.

We tried a few mocktails and the masala
cola is a nice option.

I told Mohit that if he maintains the same standard of the food on regular days as he did in the preview that he has a good thing going.

 

K’s feedback was that I had told her it’s a Parsi place but the food was not entirely Parsi, which in a way sums it up.

So should one ditch an Irani café and go to
SodaBottleOpenerWala?


Well, to get a sense of what Mumbai was about you should head to the Irani, Muslim and Goan joints of Fort, Bohri Mohalla and Colaba. But there is a section of today’s dining audience who won’t go there.


Places like SodaBottleOpenerWala and Bombay Canteen are meant for them.

Something which my friend Kashinath referred to when I shared on Facebook and I am adding his comment here:

That’s a good point and I feel that SodaBottleOpenerWala and Bombay Canteed compete with the Smokehouse Deli, Fatty Bao and the PaPaYa’s of the world for the consumer’s walled. Not the elderly Central Bank of India staff from Fort.
 

Restaurateur Riyaz Amlaani made an
interesting observation during our chat show on India’s foodiest cities. He said that we should celebrate Mumbai’s history but also give a chance to
restaurants that reflect the modern, new age world city aspirations of Mumbai.

I have paraphrased him here and this it the
video of the chat.

In my opinion, restaurants like
SodaBottleOpenerWala with its peppy design, reflect the spirit of modern Mumbai
and yet pay tribute to its past. 

Hopefully the food will maintain the standards of the preview. 

One should keep in mind that the Irani cafes of Mumbai represented the pioneering spirit of of their owners. The folks who set them up
had come from another country, Iran. They decided to set up restaurants in Mumbai to earn a living without
having a background in the industry and in a city where there were hardly any
restaurants then. They took up corner buildings which no one else did. Got people
from  across castes,  religions and genders to eat together in
public which was unheard of.

Sticking to the past and shunning the new
would be an affront to their spirit.

So if I was in South Mumbai by myself and am feeling
nostalgic, or taking people on a food heritage walk of Mumbai, then I would go
to my beloved Irani cafes there.

If I was to choose a place for a night out with
K then I’d probably head to SodaBottleOpenerWala.

Except that her first preference, like a true blue Parsi, would be for a European place!

To know more about the influences on Parsi food do check out this video where I talk to Dr Kurush Dalal about Parsi food

Disclaimer: We were hosted at a preview dinner and this should not be read as a review