IF you want to eat bara handi (literally, food from 12 pots), you have to be at Valibhai Payawala�s shop at 6 o�clock in the morning. Make it 6.30, if you are a late riser. The shop is in the inner city, the Muslim quarter of Bombay, and, within the Muslim quarter, Bohri Mohalla. The Bohris are good trenchermen, they love their food, and they eat meaty breakfasts. By the time you reach Valibhai Payawala, the shop will be full and the handis half empty. They come after the morning prayers at the nearby mosque, first pray to Allah, then pate (stomach) puja.

It is a peculiar shop, the cooking is done at the entrance. But that is a middle east custom, you see the food before you enter the shop and eat it. The food is cooked all night, in 12 handis sunk in the ground, their lids sealed with flour dough, to ensure the steam does not escape. And it is cooked on slow coal fires, various meats in their own juices, and some lentils.

Two of the handis have payas (trotters), one beef and the other mutton, the meat sticking to the bone like gelatin. Another handi contains topa, the meat around the neck of the animal, what fancier people call salami. Next, pichota, the rump of the animal and the tail, it is meat and bones, not as good at topa, but also in demand.

You may have suka, dry meat with gravy from another handi, and to get away from meat, there is the handi with harisha, three lentils mixed together with chickpea flour, besan and milk. And there is a handi with a rich soup, guaranteed to remove cold from your chest and nose. A couple of handis are not buried in the clay but kept on top of the platform. One of them contains the marrow, which would melt if put next to the fire.

And don't forget to get your lamba pau from outside. The breadman sits outside with his lamba pau. It has a touch of sourness about it and a taste of wood smoke, having been baked in wooden ovens.

RAJDHANI
IF its Wednesday, it should be Rajdhani. That's the day this nondescript little place between Dava Bazar and the Attar Market serves its munificent Rajasthani thali. And the thali is as crowded with food as the area is with merchants and tradesmen.

The thali is vegetarian, six vegetables, three types of rice, three dals, one kadhi, three types of roti, three farsans, two sweets, eight different chutneys and pickles, masala papads, curd, raita, all the deshi ghee in the world that you can pour on your food and eat, and white homemade butter.

The restaurant is long and narrow, tables for four on both sides, like the dining car of a train. Probably that is why it is called Rajdhani. It is one of the few restaurants in Bombay popular among both, vegetarians and non-vegetarians, which is the true test of a restaurant. There is a dessert and the mango juice (aam ras). They take 300 to 400 mangoes at a time, all alphonsos, put them in hot water, then squeeze the juice out of them with their hands on to a muslin cloth which covers a large vessel, allowing the juice to slowly seep through.

And there's barbecue buttermilk. It is like having a snake coffee or an Irish coffee in a five-star.

SWATI SNACKS
IF you are not careful, you are likely to miss Swati Snacks. It is a modest restaurant on the road that links Nana Chowk Junction to Tardeo Junction, opposite the Bhatia Hospital. And it serves some of the most original food in Bombay, some of the items you do not get anywhere else in town. I can challenge you on that.

The Panki Chutney are paper-thin pancakes, folded like dosas, but soft of texture. And they come wrapped in banana leaves, several times over. You strip the banana leaves off, careful so as not to scald your hand. Inside is the pancake, freshly steamed, vapour rising. It is a rice pancake, made with rice and yoghurt, and alongside is a green coriander chutney. You eat it with the chutney.

Between noon and 11 p.m. you get pani puri, bhel, sev puri, dahi batata puri, dahi misal, dahi kachori, dahi wada (Saturdays and Sundays only), ragda patties, sada dosa, masala dosa, Mysore dosa, idli, paou bhaji, the works. The special includes Satpadi Roti with gatta nu shak. Let me explain. The roti is sat padi, meaning of seven layers, and so, as you may imagine, quite thick and substantial. It is a msala roti (includes garam masala and dhania) done in wheat flour. And you eat the roti with a besan and yoghurt curry, with besan dumplings dunked in the curry. The curry is quite thin, you have to use a spoon.

If you are hungry, order the Fada Ni Khichdi. It is a whole wheat khichdi, with rice and pulses (tur, masoor, mung), yellowed with turmeric, and with green peas and potatoes. Towards the end of the preparation, tomato is aded. Yoghurt is served separately, in a bowl. And the whole dish comes in one of those trays with slots for different foods.

There are two or three more specials. For instance, to give its full name, Ek Top No Dal Bhat. Top means dekchi, and a free translation would be: rice and dal in a dekchi. The rice-dal are cooked together in a single dekchi. So much for the specials.

FIROZ FARSAN
I HAVE two favourite farsan shops, one of them is run by a Gujarati on Khadilkar Road off Girgaum (besides the farsans, in season, it sells undhiyu from Surat), the other is Firoz Farsan, run by Bohris.

This piece is on Firoz Farsan's Patra Biryani. Actually, biryani is a misnomer, there is no rice. It is patra, the patrel leaves, fried, and cooked with beef. You may have it with mutton or chicken also, but you will have to order. It is ready by 11 a.m. and you can get it through the day. The patras come from Bassein and Virar, every day. Mr. Saiffuddin Ujjainwalla, proprietor, manager, salesman and part-time cook, explains: "The raw stocks come every day, bandhela chey ek manas". A dough is prepard with channa atta, chillis, garam masala, kneaded in tamarind water, the paste generously applied on the leaves. The leaves are then neatly rolled, folded on sides, and boiled for anywhere from an hour to an hour-and-a-half. Meanwhile, the meat is being prepared and fried in a vaghar of garam masala, red chillies, ginger, garlic, a methi tadka is given. The beef is cut into tiny pieces, it is boneless, if it is mutton, the bones are included. When it is ready, the boiled and rolled patrel is cut into round slices and added to the meat. Methi bhajias are crumbled and added to the dish to thicken the gravy.

The big tapela containing the meat patra is kept on a table at the entrance to the shop. You can smell it, taste it, order it. They serve it in a saucer, a full saucer, quite a generous portion.

Or you can take it home. per kilo. Firoz Farsan is the only one which sells Patrel Biryani, in the area, in Bombay, in India, in the world.

SHER-E-PUNJAB
The Sher-e-Punjab is the oldest existing Punjabi restuarant in the city. The kitchen is a large kitchen, also a modern kitchen, though manned by traditional cooks. They understand the difference between dhabha cooking and fancy cooking. Dhaba cooking is done on slow fires, where the meat cooks in its own juices; much of modern cooking is assembly stuff, you take meat from one pan, gravy from another, vegetables from a third, and mix together.

The main dhaba food, as any bona fide truck driver will tell you, is dal and roti. The Sher-e-Punjab continues to be famous for its dal makhani. It is the urad dal, the akkha dal, more familiarly known as maa-ki-daal, cooked on a slow fire, with care and patience, and lots of tomatoes, ginger and spices. And, since it is a Punjabi dal, it is finished off with butter and cream. And with the dal you have two large tandoor rotis. perhaps, a roast papad. And, of course, a glass of lassi.

The other favourite item is the Baingan Bharta.This is a Punjabi bharta which is different.This is roasted in the tandoor. The skin is peeled, the baingan chopped finely, and fried with onions, tomatoes and ginger.

And, finally, there is the tandoori chicken and take my word for it, there is nothing like it in all of Bombay, possibly in all of Western India. This is to be expected because the Sher-e-Punjab introduced the tandoori chicken to Bombay.

The restaurant prepares it with a little sarson da tel, just a touch, but it sort of blends the meat together, makes it less flakey.

MAHESH LUNCH HOME
MAHESH Lunch Home still is the first and original Mangalorean seafood restaurant in Bombay famed for its black pomfret curries, its crab, its fish roe masalas, prawn gassi, lady fish fry. It is 25 years old. The carbs the lunch home serves are curried and tandoored. The curried crab is done in a coconut masala and the curry has a high flavour of curry and seaweed. Crab is only one of the seafood served here, Other items include mackerel, pomfret, halwa, lady fish, surmai, rawas, squid, baby shark, lobster, prawns. And you get fish all year round, monsoon not expected.

The most popular among the lot is pomfret. The restaurant cooks and seves 20 to 25 kg daily, deep fried, gassi, as curry, tandoored. Gassi is another name for curry except that it is a little more body than the curry. It is made by grinding handful of red chillies, plus jeera, dhania, tomatoes for taste, kokum and tamarind water, thereby assuring that the taste is both hot and sour.

TAJ ICE-CREAM
THE best ice-cream in town is the one that is least advertised. And though it has got a fancy name � Taj Ice-Cream � the ice-cream parlour is situated in the heart of Bohri Mohalla at Bhendi Bazar. The secret of the quality of this ice-cream is that it is hand-made, in large moles, churned out for several hours with an iron rod, what used to be known as the sancha ice-cream, created and consumed by our forefathers.

The proprietor of Taj Ice-Cream is Abbasbhai Icecreamwalla. Yes, that's his name. He is the fourth generation of the Icecreamwalla family. They have been making ice-cream for 110 years. One business, one place, one formula, one method of making! The parlour is open from 9 a.m. till midnight, 365 days of the year. It sells ice-cream, kulfi, falooda, milkshake, but the ice-cream is the main business. The ice creamis thick, even when you melt it, which I do, I like to stir it up a little, and it is heavy with milk and cream, you can taste it. This is to be expected as the milk is boiled on slow fire for six hours and made into a rabri, and the ice-cream is made from this. Nothing is added or subtracted, there is as much ice-cream as there is milk. No powder, no essence, only fruits. Seasonal and unseasonal fruits.

The sitaphal is everybody's favourite. You may eat it, large chunks of it among dollops of ice-cream. On a good day you could get upto 50 types of ice-cream or the shop could make them if you wanted. The main thing, of course, is the sancha, which makes it handmade ice-cream. And they have a delivery service where they serve ice-cream in kilograms. Phone: 346 1257.

NEW MARTIN HOTEL
THE Goa sausage chilli fry is an acquired taste. If you have not acquired it, better start. Proceed to New Martin Hotel at Arthur Bunder Road and on the way to the now extinct Strand Cinema, and join the lunch queue.

Do not look at the day's special chalked on the wall. Close your eyes and order the Goa sausage chilli fry. It is chopped up pork meat, heavily salted, thoroughly vinegared, with a few bits of potato and onion skin floating in a fatty gravy.

Mr. Baptist D'Souza, the proprietor of New Martin Hotel, is a Mangalorean, but the food is pure Goan. It has been so for more than 50 years now and is known by the cognoscenti. And the range of food coming from the small kitchen is amazing. From Prawn Pulao to Roast Beef and Steak and Onion Chips to Apricot Custard.

And the Fish Curry and Rice, the staple Goan dish, which you must have. The fish used is surmai. Occasionally pomfret, when they are available in small size and not too expensive, and the curry is red, fiery and with the right amount of tamarind blend.

DELHI DARBAR
IF you are from Delhi you will understand when I say that what Karim's is to Delhi, Delhi Darbar is to Bombay. And, before I go further, a brief note of explanation: there are many Mughlai restaurants in the city, but only one Delhi Darbar. Further, there are three Delhi Darbars in Bombay, but the one that counts, the original and No.1, is the Delhi Darbar at the corner of Grant Road, Playhouse, opposite New Roshan Talkies.

It is a large restaurant, a little confusing with its assortment of rooms. And, in spite of its size, surprisingly packed if you arrive around 10.00 p.m.

I shall begin with the justly famous super tandoori chicken. Super means broiler, the regular is a cockrel, please note the subtle distinctions.

You get a full tandoori chicken, two legs, two breats, plump and juicy, and admirably tender on account of the hours of marinating in curd and ginger-garlic paste, turmeric, garam masala, and red chilli powder for both colour and taste.

Put rock salt on it, what they call chaat masala, squeeze lemon, take the mint chutney one side, and the onions if you like. I don't, not with my tandoori chicken, with chicken tikka, yes.

There are mutton dishes and biryanis for the Arabs, a little too bland for us. But you may order the Darbar Special: a combination of mutton, chicken, brain, liver, kindey, done in a brown gravy. The mutton is cooked separately and aded, as also the stock of the mutton thus cooked, wich goes ito the general gravy.

There are two types of kadai mutton, one done in green masala, the other in red, they are very different from each other. You will have to order both to know the difference. If you order only one, I suggest green.

If it is lunch time and not dinner time, I would propose biryani rice and dal gosht. It is masoor dal, with mutton and mutton stock, and pieces of dudhi.

You get the khichda, which is my favourite Muslim dish. It is wheat, rice, channa, masoor, all pulses, cooked overnight, with a little oil, mixed on the morning after with mutton, onions, green chillis, garlic, then biresta (crisp fried onions) and mint leaves put on top.

UDIPI SHRI KRISHNA BOARDING
BANG outside Matunga station, Central Railway, is one of Mumbai's oldest and best known Udipi restaurants, A. Rama Nayak's Udipi Shri Krishna Boarding, established 1942. Food is served on plantain leaves, eaten with bare hands, three servings of rice (with rassam, with dal and with dahi), the GSB (Gaud Saraswat Brahmin) special � avial, powder chutney with pure ghee, six payasms for six days, Mondays closed.

It is a quaint, charming restaurant, on the first floor of a municipal market, more like a gentlemen's club, but for all its quaintness it is extremely efficiently run. Service is precise, standards of hygiene high. A sign above the kitchen door welcomes customers to inspect it, with one condition, customers should remove their chappals before entering the kitchen. And there are instructions written everywhere, "Please buy your tokens in advance"; "Unused coupons can be used next time"; "Try eating in leaf in Indian way, without spoon"; "Plate meals is ideal for the blue collar man"; "Udipi means good food".

About the last, I can vouch, the food is good, it is also wholesome. The rice is surti colum, direct from Chandrapur, brought by truckloads, for the puris and chapattis, wholewheat is bought and personally ground by the restaurant; the vegetables come from the Byculla market every morning; the pappads (udit pappads) are made fresh every two days; and meals are cooked twice a day, no leftovers are served. It is a balanced diet, rice, wheat, lentils, vegetables, dahi and buttermilk, the calorie count for a meal is 1,500 to 1,600.

So, let's have a full meal. (Lunch is from 10.30 a.m. to 2.30 p.m. dinner 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.). There is normally a queue, you pick your token and wait, as in a bank. There are newspapers to read in the waiting room, quite pleasant and, once again as in a bank, an electronically operated indicator which tells which number can go in for the meal.

The restaurant is divided into two parts: the plate section (Rs. 16 per plate meal, with curd, Rs. 15 without curd) and the plaintain leaf section (Rs. 40 per meal, everything unlimited). In the plate (thali) meal, everything is limited except rassam and sambar, but the food and the kitchen are the same.

In the plate meal, everything is served together at one go, in the full meal, things are served on your patra, one by one.

The last time I was there, I had the full (patra) meal. Note: the plain plantain leaf itself costs Rs. 2. The meal began with a Mysore rassam prepared from the water in which the dal is boiled, given a tadka with sesame seeds and pepper). The rassam changes daily, there is a tomato rassam, a lemon rassam on Saturdays, and a kokum rassam on Tuesdays. With the rassam, I was served a sambar, to be eaten later with rice, a dry vegetable, cabbage, and a wet vegetable, potato song, which was tiny pieces of boiled potatoes in a red gravy of chillis, tomatoes and chopped onions, cooked with a rye tadka in a little coconut oil.

There was a choice of chapatis and puris, rice, of course, papads, mango achar, buttermilk with ground green chillis and ginger, a fruit raita, and dahi, and Mysore pak.

Make sure that the rice is freshly served and hot. That alone is worth disembarmking at Matunga Station and dropping in for an authentic Udipi meal.

PANCHAM PURIWALA
THE Heritage Society should include it on its list: Pancham Puriwala at Bori Bunder, Bombay's, and perhaps India's, oldest puri bhaji restaurant. It goes back some 150 years, give or take a half-dozen: the same shop, the same location, the same family, the same food.

Even the prices have not gone up all that much.The puris are large, and a little thickish, made by practised hands, which must be making a few hundred (thouand?) puris a day, fried in Godrej ghee. They have a pleasant fresh taste about them, and are slightly saltish. They always come straight from the frying pan, and they are always hot. Be careful.

Hundreds upon hundreds of people have their lunch and dinner at Pancham Puriwala every day, and also their in-between meals, always puri bhaji. There is an achar that goes with it, a chilli and lime pickle placed in a large bowl in the centre of the table. You help yourself to it. The pickle is made of full green chillis with rinds of lemon, it is a Pancham Puri special.

Pancham Puriwala is located at the entrance to Bazargate, the VT end of it, opposite the Bhatia Baug. The lane is also known as Parsi Bazar Street. It is an interesting lane, a part of old-old Bombay.

It is simple restaurant, Grade III, open to the street, tables and chairs crammed together, a mezzanine crammed with more tables and chairs. A small portion is cut off for the kitchen, also open to the street. Two men roll the puris, using the reverse side of a thali as their base, a third fries them in a large cauldron. They work from 8 o'clock in the morning, when the first customers come in for their breakfast, to midnight, rolling out a steady steam of puris.

Besides the standard puri bhaji, you also get a masala puri bhaji. The masala is udad dal filled with spices. A hole is made in the puri dough and the masala is inserted into it. Then, with rolling pin, it is rolled out like the standard puri.

Beside the potato-bhopla bhaji, there are other bhajis available, channa masala, aloo mutter, aloo palak.

KAILASH PARBAT
MY introduction to Sindhi food (snacks would be more correct) was during my days at the St. Xavier's College. Not in the canteen, which served Goa curry and rice, but opposite the college, on the fringes of the Azad Maidan. The country had been partitioned and from the newly-formed Pakistan had come the Sindhis. To my untrained eyes, they were strange people; the women wore pajamas and the men seemed to be too enterprising and energeic to be classifed as poor helpess refugees. And they were all great eaters, cooking and eating all the time.

Mr. Parsram P. Mulchandani, in Karachi, he and his brothers used to sell pani puris on Bans Road and their product had become justly famous. Then came the holocaust, and they picked up the utensils in which they used to make their puris an ragdas and came to Bombay.

These same Mr. Mulchandani and brothers, five years after partition, opened Kailash Parbat Hindu Hotel in First Pasta Lane, Colaba, a restaurant that has become a landmark for Sindhi food in Bombay.

We start with the pani puris. Instead of mung that the UP bhelpuriwallas use at Chowpatty, at Kailash Parbat they are khara bundi. This is the Sindhi way, the bundi crisp and crunchy and biting between the teeth. And for the chutney, they use tamarind juice and a touch of sugar, instead of dates and jaggery. The taste is the original Pakistan taste. Or so I am assured. The best way of eating the pani puri is standing. Go in a group, two would be adequate, though four would be ideal, as it gives you enough time to consume and relish the first puri before the second one arrives. The pani puri stall is out in the courtyard and the first thing you will see as you approach the restaurant. You gather around the handi carrying the spiked water. The "chef" gently holds the puri in the palm of his hand and with a well-placed thumb cracks the top shell. In the hole thus made are stuffed the bundis and the potatoes; then, with one clean swoop, the puri is dipped into the tamarind and sugar chutney, withdrawn and dipped into the chilli powder-jeera dhania-amli-rocksalt pani; then hands it round to the customers. Amazingly, in spite of all the liquid stufing, and the thin skin of the puris they do not drip.

You put the entire concoction in your mouth, then gently bite. You experience the sensation of fresh crisp puris, crackling bundis, sour and sweet chutney and chilled masala water simultaneously invading your mouth. Some customers order a glassful of the chilled water by itself � it is said to have great digestive qualities.

IDEAL CORNER
PARSI restaurants are disappearing in the city at the same rate as the Parsi community. Still there are a handful left (restaurants) and one of them is the Ideal Corner (80 seats, tables, go-go stools, packed at lunchtime) in Gunbow Street, Fort. It is genuinely Parsi meaning Parsi-owned, Parsi-managed, Parsi food. The menu includes the community's classics: dhansak and kababs, pulao dal, khichdi-kheema, cutlet gravy, sali boti, bhaji dana gosht, atheli marghi.

The sali boti may be had every day, six days of the week. The boti, small round pieces of mutton, like smooth pebbles, is cooked to a velvety tenderness in an onion and tomato gravy. Very little water is used in the cooking, if at all. When ready and about to be served, the sali, which is crisply fried strips of potato, is heaped on top of the boti. Sali boti is most popular at Ideal Corner, dhansak comes second. A lot of friends ask me where do you get a good dhansak in Bombay. I tell them, Rippon Club, Yacht Club, CCI, in that order. And since you have to be a member of the clubs, or be invited by a member, your best bet is Ideal Corner. It is also the cheapest dhansak of the lot.

NOOR MOHAMMADI HOTEL
FOR breakfast, visit Noor Mohammadi Hotel at Bhendi Bazar. Order nalli nihari, methi kheema and ghee dal, all in half plates. They don't serve tea, but with a breakfast like that, who needs tea!

You'll have to go early, the nalli nihari finishes by 9 a.m., even earlier. The meat is lovely, the best part of the buffalo, the thigh muscle, cooked on slow coal for 12 hours, till it becomes so tender that a toothless customer can eat it.

It is just meat, boneless, one nice chunk of it. And it comes with a spicy gravy, quite sharp with garam masala and pepper. Order a fresh roti, a tandoori, or a softer chapatti. Dip the roti in the gravy, break the meat with a spoon, and eat. Yes, it is spicy, for your Bombay palate, that is. But if you are a Muslim from Moradabad, you will eat it with a sort of a pickle. A combination of thin sliver of ginger and chopped green chillies. They call it nihari ka masala, and it is put on the table in front of you.

Noor Mohammadi is practically at the junction of Bhendi Bazar. It is a small restaurant, nothing fancy, crowded at lunch and dinner time, a little easier at breakfast, the service is brisk, as it always is at these type of restaurants, and everything is served in half plates, unless you specify you want a full plate.