Joseph's : Mumbai Master Butcher

This post is for home-sick expats craving quality meat who think there is no western style butcher in Mumbai.  Or worse, for those expats who actually go all the way up to the Renaissance Hotel in Powai to buy their meat (does the head chef know about this?). Or even worse than that, for those British whom I have heard bring frozen steak on a flight all the way from the UK in their luggage and try to squeeze it past Indian Customs. 

Perhaps there are many quality butchers in Mumbai, I don't know - but what I can tell you is that Joseph's Cold Storage (which I believe to be the best) is about one minute's walk away from our apartment in Pali Naka and they do great steak.  Yay.

The first I heard of Joseph's was when I was stuck back in London for four months apart from Mr Jules, prior to me coming out to join him.  One day, I had a joyous text message announcing that he found a place to buy Yorkshire Pork Sausages. All was right with the world again.

Today, I went to buy steak for tonight's dinner.  It doesn't say fillet, sirloin or rump steak on the board - there is one choice available and it's called tenderloin or 'undercut'. I would say that it is closest to sirloin steak but it is has hardly any fat on it.  You buy it in whatever lumps of meat are available - usually anything over 1kg.  Today I had to buy a piece that was 1.5kgs.  And by UK standards it's so cheap....300 rupees per kilo - that's £3.50 or $5.6 per kilo!  Because there is only two of us I have them slice it up and placed in two bags so that I can freeze one of them. That means that tonight's portion of steak will cost about £1.75 for the two of us.

What's available / the pricelist

You can also buy lean mince, hallal chicken breasts and joints, Yorkshire pork shoulder or leg (we made a mean roast a couple of weekends ago), bacon, beef etc etc.  The full list is on the board above.  Everything is cheap by western standards and as I have found, cuts of meat are as good as anything you can get in Waitrose.  Not so great is the bacon - it is a little too salty but if you chop it up small and add it to dishes such as spaghetti and pesto, it is fine.  (Note: the bacon comes in packets and looks like ham, but it is not, you must still cook it). The sausages again are too salty and we would not recommend them for a British or American fry up (oh yes, Mr Jules was a bit disappointed in the end with his sausages).  However, they probably would be good chopped up into a pasta sauce with fennel seeds.  Also with the ground beef, the mincing is a bit too fine for say, a bolognaise sauce (it's more keema style for curries and koftas), so Mr Jules and I shipped a mincer from Amazon  to mince the undercut and it works just fine. You are all invited for lasagne! 

Free range eggs are also available (bring your own box or you have to carefully carry them home in a plastic bag like we did!) - 6 for 23 rupees (27p), home-style curry sauces and pickles.  In fact I am sure if you ask the very nice owner, Anil, you can probably get pretty much anything for your home cooking requirements.

As a side note, you can buy beef and pork because this business is run by Christian folk - Anil and Sandra D'Souza - and Bandra has a long Christian heritage being settled by the Portuguese in the 1700s. You will often find Anil at the counter serving throngs of expats - I have seen French, Japanese, American, many British - as well as Indians who come far and wide to buy his quality products.

Anil manning his meat empire

When you go to the shop on St John's road and go up to the counter you will see large numbers of staff milling about in the back.  There are four or five men at the counter taking orders and shouting them to the back (they wear the red t-shirts), there are about ten guys pulling stuff out of the fridges (blue t-shirts, yellow aprons) and then two counters with several more guys doing the chopping and weighing.  It's quite an operation - I can only guess that they are supplying the many local restaurants as well as the expat and non-vegetarian community.

The hordes of workers.  The shop is closely managed, very clean and the staff wear uniforms.

The guys who take the orders.  Anil let me take a photo behind the counter. This boy wanted to get in all the photos.

The big man himself.  Anil D'Souza "here to serve God and here to serve you"...or so he says

Selection of cooking sauces to go with your meat purchases.

The beef tenderloin / undercut.  Very lean and very tender (really really sorry to any vegetarian Hindus reading this post)

Last weekend's yummy Yorkshire roast pork with crackling and roast potatoes.  All achieved in our convection oven/microwave. After being in British Roast Dinner Wilderness, we were a bit hasty to get it on the plate and eat it, hence the lack of presentation!

Tonight we will be having steak with chips, fried onions, mushrooms and green beans.  Or perhaps I will slice it thinly and make a stroganoff with mushrooms and onions.  I will have to see what Mr Jules fancies when he comes in.....

Joseph Cold Storage
Gasper Enclave
Shop No 15, St John's Road
Pali
Bandra West
Mumbai 400 050

Tues to Sat 8am to 1.30 pm and 4pm to 8pm
Sun & Mon 8am to 1.30pm only.

PostScript: we had mashed potatoes and al-dente green beans with our steak.  Yum.

Woman v Thali

Yesterday I had my first proper thali.  Which is a bit ridiculous considering that I have been here two months now.  My previous experiences of thalis were when I dined at Masala Zone near Carnaby Street in London with friends who are reading this blog.  But I have to tell you guys that now I have had a 'proper' one, I realise that we have all been mere amateurs at the thali eating game!

For folks back home who do not know what a thali is - thali is Hindi for "plate" and is an Indian meal made up of a selection of dishes served in small metal bowls on a large tray. The dishes will generally be native to a particular region.

The restaurant of choice yesterday was 'Rajdhani' in Phoenix Mills mall (we were out buying western made pillows to replace the Indian made ones that have given us bad neck ache).  Feeling peckish,  I managed to persuade Mr Jules to enter this meatless shrine to Thali with its 72 different rotating menus with 22,464 delicacies from Gujarat and Rajasthan.



The Tikka Guy...nice slippers!


After successfully dodging the tikka man who wanted to apply a red dot between our brows, we were nicely seated at our table upon which were our empty thali trays and bowls - NINE of them! When I came in I wondered why there were so many waiters milling around but it soon became very clear.  Basically each of them is consigned a dish to serve and they come one by one to fill up the bowls on your tray.

Just some of the tens of hovering waiters

Now I was wondering how I was going to explain to my readers what we actually ate as it all came by so quickly and I couldn't really understand what the waiters were saying.  But very helpfully on the Rajdhani website they list the rotating menu and the menu for the day (all 72 of them!) so I can now enlighten myself and you at the same time.  Here goes:

First of all came the accompaniments: green chutney, red chutney, mango pickles and tomato & cucumber salad (Kakadi)  This was quickly followed by the Farsans (equivalent of starters and snacks) which were a yummy vegetable samosa and khandvi which is a kind of pasta roll made from gram flour, spices and yoghurt.  Then we were given toasted papads (poppadoms). 



To begin: the accompaniments and Farsans - the Khandvi is the yellow roll on the right.


Before you've even managed to take a bite of your samosa (perhaps you are supposed to wait for the whole tray to be filled up before you start eating?), several more of our bowls were filled up with vegetable dishes (subzis).  These included a paneer kofta curry (my favourite of the day), karela sambhariya (which I think is stuffed okra?), batata kanda rassawala (Mr Jules's favourite being a potato curry) and panchkuti kathol (a delicious combo of pulses).  Then came the dhals (lentil dishes): surtu dal, yellow dhal and hari moong ki dal (cooked using whole green gram dhal). 

Not sure which one this was but it seemed to be dhal & veg mixed with biscuity bread, giving it a nice crunchy texture.

By this point my eyes were definitely feeling bigger than my stomach and I was starting to sag under the weight of the rich vegetables, dhals and appetisers.  But hang on, we're only half way there!  Breads were then added to our trays....rotis, stuffed bhaji bajra rotla (delicious roti type bread stuffed with a coconutty sweet potato mixture) and some other flat type breads which were all new to me.  Just when we thought that was it, we were asked if we wanted 'specials' - additional veg curry dishes.  But at that moment I was nearly holding up the table with my stomach so I politely refused (for information, they were bhakri and Rajasthani mirchi bhareli).

The full monty (one empty bowl as I refused the 'special')



Dahi Wada Kasmiri - I treated this like a side salad to take the edge off the curries

Now comes the side dish Dahi Wada Kasmiri (pictured above) - lentil based savoury balls topped with fresh curds (yoghurt) and sprinkled with chilli, roasted cumin and garnished with sweet and sour chutneys.  Yum.

Yet another waiter came by with the desserts - (everything gets served at the same time) - amarakhand, kala jamun and apple jalebi.  I am afraid I am not a fan of Indian sweets - they are mostly TOO sweet for the western palate - plus I don't like having them on my plate at the same time as the rest of my food.  So I also refused those but the waiter seemed perplexed that I didn't want any so eventually I agreed to one sugary apple jalebi.  But actually I gave it to Mr Jules in the end and I just had NO way of squeezing it in!




An apple jalebi - or as I would describe it, sugar deep fried in ghee!


You think that the thali is now fully served?  WRONG!  First of all, the waiters (at the direction of the big cheese head waiter who wears a smart black suit) come by one after one to re-fill our bowls and top up the breads. You can keep topping up as much as you want, it's unlimited!  But not only that, basmati rice and khichdi (a kind of Indian comfort food - rice mixed with dhal and mild spices) are plonked in the middle of your tray to finish off.  I did have another samosa and had one or two of the dhals and veg curries topped up.  This was absolutely to my detriment - I was at uncomfortable bursting point at the end of the meal.

The speed with which your dishes are topped up is astounding - and they manage to flick the food into your bowls from a distance without spilling a drop!

The aftermath...looks like a tornado hit my tray.  I couldn't eat everything, but I did give it a bloody good go!

Despite having to be physically helped out of the restaurant, I thought my first authentic thali was delicious!  Even Mr Jules was impressed. I look forward to trying different variants and hopefully ones that are slightly more 'home-cooked' at different Thali restaurants across Mumbai.

This meal cost 745 rupees £8.75/$14 for the two of us including a large bottle of mineral water. Buttermilk was also served as an accompanying drink but I didn't have any.

There are many branches of Rajdhani in Mumbai and all over India but the one we went to was at:

Palladium
Level-3, Palladium,
High Street Phoenix,
Lower Parel (West),
Mumbai

Menus and information can be found here:

http://www.rajdhani.co.in/index.html

Happy Independence Day India!

Indian Independence Day commemorates independence from British Rule and its re-birth as a sovereign nation on 15th August 1947 (66 years ago). 

Thinking that today would be a huge day of celebrations and flag waving, we went out on to the streets of Bandra (it is a national holiday today) to find everything as normal, the shops open and people going about their business as usual.  How very British, all that's missing is bank holiday shopping for a sofa at DFS and picnicking in the rain by the side of the road (we can show you guys how to celebrate!).

Quite disappointed - the Indians usually never miss a reason to party - we went for lunch around the corner at Indigo Deli intead.

I am not going to write anything more than that.  I should be outside in a dense crowd waving my arms in the air and trying not to look too British.  Happy Independence Day India.

Indigo Deli Bandra - a very nice Smoked Salmon and Lobster Salad

Mr Jules's 'so-so' Indigo Deli Rueben Sandwich



A surreptitious photo taken inside Indigo Deli. It's nicer than this looks, honest.



There are western style jams and marmalades available to buy at Indigo Deli - this is black grape jam.




OK, I will say one last thing...about this bin. To me this bin signifies something funny about Independence Day. We bought it in Pali Market after lunch and Mr Jules carried it back to the apartment. He got stared at for doing this. Why are we carry that bin ourselves, why do we not have a servant to do it?   Why are we not having it delivered? Why as a white man, are you carrying that object associated with muck and filth? Well my Indian friends, this is what British Man does. He does things for himself! (and also walks behind his wife down the street).

The Graffiti of Ranwar, Bandra

On the way to dinner in Lower Parel the other night, we took a short cut around the back of Lilavati Hospital, south of Hill Road and that is when I discovered Ranwar in Bandra.  This bohemian enclave, with its colonial bungalows, narrow streets and artistically graffitied walls has an entirely different feel to it - one which really appealed to me (perhaps this is the closest I am going to get to South London right now?!) We came back today for a Sunday stroll to take a closer look and so that I could take some photos:

I have looked up some history on the area and apparently Ranwar is one of the original 24 pakhadis (hamlets) that made up Bandra since the earliest documented history in early 1700s. It has managed to retain its village character even as present-day development has hemmed it in on all sides*.

A local tells me that the village now attracts 'French Hipsters'...perhaps because the area has a relaxed Goan feel to it and the pace of life seems much slower. Unfortunately Chapel Road has now also become a convenient thoroughfare (hence how we discovered it) so if you are at  a loose end on a Sunday in Bandra, it is definitely worth taking a look when traffic is at a minimum. You will find most of the street art around Chapel Road and Waroda Road.  I have to admit, I find the hamlet of Ranwar utterly charming.

   

Shame someone has grafittied the graffiti

My favourite!




Lastly, a typical Ranwar house

*A detailed history of Ranwar can be found here: http://www.goldenbandra.com/RanwarCB.htm

Crazy Dahi Handi Human Pyramid Festival

There are a lot of festivals in India and I was excited that this would be the first one I would experience since arriving in Bombay.  And having now seen it, I can not imagine there is a more crazy celebration than Dahi Handi.

Dahi Handi or Govinda is a "sport" organized on the birthday of Lord Krishna (a mischievous little god-fella). Although celebrated across India, the best place to see the spectacle is in Mumbai where the festival originated.

Here's how it works: all over the city, Handis - earthen pots filled with buttermilk are strung up on ropes across the road at varying heights (the limit being 40 feet).  Participants, known as Govindas or BalGolpals, gather together under a Handi to make a human pyramid with the aim of reaching and breaking the pot to release the liquid. Those around may try to throw water at them to thwart their efforts. The sport is based on the legends about mischievous Krishna stealing makhan (butter) or dahi (curd) from handis.

"Handi" (earthen pot filled with buttermilk and strung up high above the road on a rope)

These days the stakes are much higher - you don't just get buttermilk slopped on your head, the teams are all in with a chance of winning serious money. In fact we heard that prize money for one particular Dahi Handi in Thane district was set at a whopping 50 lakh! (5 million rupees or around £62,000!).  The money comes from private companies and political parties who use the event to promote their campaigns. Because of the high stakes, the many participating Govindas will practice for several months on the run up to the event.

Yesterday, there were around 2,000 Govinda troops out and about in Mumbai, competing for around 4,000 Handis (Note: I am not sure about this number, different sources state different figures). I have also since found out that the World Record for a human pyramid was broken when a Govinda troop from Jogeshwari in Mumbai reached 43.79 feet with a 9 level human pyramid. Well done those Govindas!

As there were plenty of Handis strung up in Bandra where we live, Mr Jules and I went to investigate by foot.  A festive atmosphere pervaded the streets which were buzzing with crowds of people and loud music. We hung around several street corners waiting for Govindas to pass through whilst at the same time trying to dodge oncoming traffic. The teams mostly get about the city in trucks and on mopeds - travelling in cavalcades from one Handi site to the next with the aim of cracking as many of the pots as possibe.



A team of Govidas arriving by truck - seemingly supported by one of the policitical parties


Below is a sequence of photographs I managed to take, demonstrating the pyramid going up and the Handi finally being reached by a small boy (the usual technique from what I could tell). 




What you can not see from this is the crashing down of the pyramid afterwards! Of course, as is the Indian way, there is no regard for health and safety (save for the small boy at the top wearing a crash helmet). I also read in the paper today that sadly, one 19 year old boy died falling from a six storey pyramid and 40 others were injured across the state.  You won't see any crash mats or St Johns Ambulances at these events!

Here are some more photos:

Those near the bottom of the above pyramid - covered in buttermilk,  The successful spilling of the liquid over everyone in the pyramid is an important element of the sport as it signifies unity of the team.

The broken Handi



A team of Govindas passing through to the next Handi location.  Some of the teams are very organised and wear T-shirts with logos.



  

Approach to the Pali Hill Handi

A group of street kids - inspired to make their own mini-pyramid

The scene on 33rd Road, Bandra.

A fully formed pyramid



....and another. The team has to 'hold the pose' for at least 5 seconds to be in with a shout.

The boy at the top of the pile...I would say about 7 years old.
Good of them to give him a crash helmet though.(I have since read that the youngest Govinda to take part was three years old) 




But these Bandra Pyramids looks so amateur compared to this one I captured off the TV!