The Marine Lines Khau Gulley, 15th May 2019 |
Eat and drink to your heart’s content at this food street |
Khau gully, which literally translates into ‘eat street’, is a generic name for a street packed with street food vendors and small eateries. There is no one khau gully in Mumbai. There are in fact many Khau Gullies spread across the city, each with its set of loyalists.
With Zhan Gao of CCTV at the end of an hour long live broadcast |
From Mumbai to China. That’s Zhan before we started |
Unfortunately the new office complexes of Mumbai, the Saki Nakas and the BKCs and the Malads for example, do not have established khau gullys. Folks working here here have to depend on cafes and restaurants located in office buildings, or on deliveries from the sparse restaurants around for foodNeither option can compare with what the khao gullys, of what is now ‘old’ Mumbai, offer in terms of price, taste and even freshness in my opinion.
Forty years of experience flavoured the bhel, sev and dahi puri here |
Beautifully rendered masala dosas, made fresh by a couple of young hardworking Tamilians, followed next. The chutneys served with these were stellar too. Zhan’s favourite that evening as I later learnt.
The streets of Mumbai have many Tamilian dosawalas even though the restaurants are dominated by those from Udupi in Mangalore |
A toast with chai |
Fresh vada pavs were served to us, while the curry for the evening’s Malvani chicken curry got ready in a huge kadhai at the side at the same shop |
Snacking on idli vada while the dosa got ready |
The area looked very familiar to me and that’s when it all came back to me. I realised that the first time that I had come here was in late 1996 or early 1997. I was an MBA student in Kolkata then. I had come to Mumbai with some of my classmates to give placement brochures to companies here. I remembered coming to this lane to give the brochure to possibly what was a finance company in one of the buildings near by.I returned to Kolkata after the trip. I got placed with a market research agency from campus and thus began my journey from Kolkata to Mumbai with my eventually settling down here.
Going live on CCTV. Here’s the link |
At the start of our CCTV broadcast |