🍜Local food

A ball of mashed potato with turmeric, green chilli, ginger and garlic, dipped in gram-flour batter, deep-fried, and pressed into a pav roll with chutneys and a fried green chilli on the side. It was sold outside the Dadar station in the 1960s as a one-handed meal for mill workers, and it is still the fastest hot food in Mumbai.

Order it with the dry red lasun (garlic) chutney; the sweet tamarind one is optional. Eat it standing, within a minute of it leaving the oil.

Pav bhaji started as a late-night dish for textile-mill workers around the cotton exchange: leftover vegetables mashed together on the tawa with a tomato base and a masala blend, finished with a slab of butter and a squeeze of lime, and eaten with soft rolls toasted in the same butter.

It is a sit-down dish rather than a walking one, and the good places serve it with raw chopped onion and lime on the side. Ask for it khada if you prefer the vegetables left in pieces.

Bhelpuri is assembled in front of you in a few seconds — puffed rice, sev, chopped onion and tomato, boiled potato, coriander, tamarind and green chutney, all tossed in a bowl and tipped into a paper cone. The point is texture: it has to be eaten immediately, before the chutney softens the rice.

It belongs to the beach. Juhu and Girgaon Chowpatty at sunset are where the city eats it, alongside sev puri and pani puri from the same carts.

A stack of thin white bread with coriander-mint chutney and layers of cucumber, tomato, boiled potato, beetroot and onion, sprinkled with a black-salt sandwich masala. The plain version is cut into triangles; the grilled version is pressed with butter and cheese until the edges crisp.

It is the standard mid-morning food of the office districts — sold from carts outside every commercial building in Fort and Nariman Point.

Berry pulao is Mumbai Parsi cooking at its most recognisable: spiced rice layered with mutton, chicken, prawns or egg, and studded with zereshk, the sour red barberries imported from Iran, which cut through the richness of the rice.

It is a restaurant dish rather than a home one, and it is tied to a handful of Parsi and Irani houses in the Fort area. Portions are large; one is normally enough for two people with a starter.

Minced mutton cooked down with onion, ginger, garlic and garam masala, often with a fried egg on top, mopped up with buttered pav. It is served from opening time, and in the older Irani cafes it comes with bun maska and a glass of sweet Irani chai.

The Irani cafes — founded by Zoroastrian immigrants from Iran around the turn of the 20th century — are a disappearing institution: from hundreds in the 1950s, only a few dozen are left.