Like Owen Wilson’s Gil Pender, the protagonist of Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris (2011) who spends all his waking hours romanticising bygone eras, we too are more enchanted by the sepia-toned past inhabited by our ancestors. As a result, we found much to love in the thoughtfully aged look of Pali Bhavan, Bandra’s new Indian restaurant, owned by Mishali Sanghani and Suren Joshi, who run the suburb’s all-day restaurant Pali Village Café.
While Pali Village Café exudes the quaint charm of a café in Paris, Pali Bhavan, with its carefully curated relics, has an undeniably Indian feel to it. Under Sanghani’s supervision, the two-storeyed building, which was previously Pali Presidency, a middling multi-cuisine restaurant with a pub called Boat Club on the ground floor, was stripped of its unremarkable décor to make way for a bar on the ground floor with carved temple pillars holding up the first floor dining room. A chipped-at-the-edges stone staircase leads up to the pale brown and sea green dining area, with blue-green Madras checks-inspired floor tiles; wood tables polished to look like marble tops; and cane chairs. The walls of this room are packed with yellowing studio photos of Indian families, which Sanghani said were sourced from old markets across India, as were the carved wood heads of deers, and baroque plates that also adorn the walls.
It appears that while shopping for vintage knick-knacks across the country, Sanghani also gathered inspiration for their vast menu, which draws from the cuisines of the north, south and central parts of India. The kitchen is helmed by Richard D’Souza, a former chef at Bombay Brasserie, the fine dining Indian restaurant at the Taj in Cape Town. You can either mix things up with chaat, butter chicken, thayir sadam (curd rice), Hyderabadi dum biryani, payasam and rabdi, which can overwhelm the palate, or stick to one region, as we did with the North Indian fare. The pomelo salad with shaved coconut and fried onion strands was tart and light and served the purpose of a palate cleanser. Then came the Sanghani-recommended rataloo and mattar tikki chaat, which was made up of a single, plump mashed peas tikki blanketed by chilled yoghurt drizzled with tamarind chutney and garnished with salli (crisp strands of fried potato). It’s a tasty appetiser, but for the price tag (Rs185), we expected something more inventive than straightforward dahi chaat. We skipped the mini vada pao (served with ghati masala as it is on our streets), for the galouti kebabs. The hockey puck-sized kebabs, resting on wafer thin crisp naans, were as tender as freshly made paneer, and of the same velvety texture of liver pate.
The most nuanced dish of our meal was the nalli nihari, which struck the perfect balance between spice and meatiness. The morsels of meat, fortified by fatty tissue and coated in a richly perfumed russet brown gravy, were quickly devoured with the aid of fluffy phulkas and garlick-y naans. Another standout dish was the aromatic wild rice and pine nut pulao, made with long grains of black and white rice that were perfectly al dente. The staff assured us that the final course would not be heavy or syrupy , and sure enough the canary yellow, kesar-infused rabdi had so little sugar that it tasted most un-rabdi like. The only sweetness was from the caramel glazed puffs of popcorn dunked into the bland dessert that didn’t quite win us over. If like us you have an affinity for paan, don’t miss their inventive paan kulfi, a frozen dessert of paan-flavoured kulfi wrapped with a betel leaf.
Pali Bhavan is a fine dining restaurant in a suburb that has very few of those outside of five star hotels and none that are devoted to Indian fare. And as is the case at most fine dining establishments, Pali Bhavan too overcharges for some undeserving dishes like, for instance, their chaat items. We were, however, happy to shell out Rs645 for the nalli and Rs525 for the galouti kebabs, because for their technical mastery and complexity of flavour, they offer complete value for money. Overall though it felt like money and time well spent because like the movies, our meal at Pali Bhavan provided, if only for a short while, an escape from the present.
A meal for two costs approximately Rs4,000 without alcohol.