I’ve posted on Bombay Brunch on a more general-purpose thread:
On the evidence of two large orders, I think they deserve their own.
I won’t repeat too much of what I’ve said elsewhere, but I strongly urge you all to patronize it. In the red ocean of tikka masala on which most other GBA Indian restaurants are content to float, this operation stays uncompromisingly true. Not to “pure” Maharashtrian food, but rather to its interpretation in Bombay (which allows them to sneak in a sambhar here to accompany their batata wadas, and a paneer there to stuff into their savory karanjis).
This coming week they have kArla (aka karela, aka bitter melon), masAle bhath (spiced rice), and – at a stiff price – a platter of puraN poLis.
I’ve just now eaten half a puraN poLi (flatbread stuffed with roasted chana dal and jaggery) from BB along with the supplied katAchi Amti (a thin lentilly sauce). While growing up, we’d also have a small bowl of warm milk (for separate dipping/crumbling) and some melted ghee.
As with some of their other food, the BB interpretation of the PP is heftier than the version in my home growing up (and heftier than at Vatan in NYC – where it appears as an occasional add-one to their prix fixe thali). Still, it’s excellent and I can’t wait to eat the other 13 1/2.
@Parsnipity: Bombay Brunch has several gluten-free options, all exceedingly tasty. Their “bhakri” section offers a choice of four gluten free flatbreads, all rustic. I don’t know if rusticity is your thing – the least coarse are the jowar (sorghum) and tandul (rice). The veg curries (all GF) that they offer go very well with their breads, but if you want to be a poor Maharashtrian farm worker for a bit, you can have the bhakri with pounded, dried chillies – to which, depending on your financial circumstances, you could add garlic, peanuts, etc. Or you could go full middle class and have your bhakri (preferably bajri – pearl millet) with jaggery and ghee.
@fooddabbler - forgive me if you’ve noted this elsewhere, but have you generally been ordering the single serving options or the family-style/trays? And do you reheat throughout the week or try to eat the day that you pick up?
The menu looks fabulous and I love the idea of having a few meals tucked away for later in the week, but am wondering about the logistics.
If by any chance you do Charlestown, they offer a pickup option.
We try to avoid delivery, but feebly so. Your attitude may be different, of course, or your reasons different, but we make a distinction between businesses such as Instacart, DoorDash, etc., and places that do their own delivery and depend on it to survive. BB is in that category as is Khipi.
I have not noted this elsewhere, but I forgive you anyway.
I generally order the single portions, but sometimes get two servings of a dish that I feel I might particularly like. I did that with the batatawada-sambhar combo two orders ago, for example. Since the food is vegetarian, and often vegan, it keeps well in the fridge so I plan for about three days of eating, and freeze what I think I won’t be able to consume. Any lentil-based dish freezes well, as do some of their vegetables, and all of their flat breads. I have frozen some of their fried sabudaNa vadas (tapioca balls), but not yet defrosted and attempted to resurrect. I might try a technique I’ve used in the past: microwave on a reheat setting to get the insides warm, then blast briefly under a broiler, with frequent turning, to get the outsides crisp again.
Their “party” sections bear close watching because in addition to large trays (a $50 tray of gulab jamuns, etc.) an occasional small dish shows up there – mango shrikhand (drained yoghurt) last week, tilgul ladoos (sesame-jaggery balls) this week – and nowhere else.
On that (and I get it delivered) my wife and I do eat a substantial lunch from it each time it arrives noonish. Some of the food is still warm, especially the flat breads, and it’s an even greater pleasure to eat those items fresh.
I continue to order from them pretty much every weekend, and they continue to be excellent. Let me give a particular shoutout to their kanda bhajjias (aka “onion pakoras”). They’re the best I’ve had in 35 years in North America. Unlike the doughy, dense versions you get pretty much everywhere else, these are ethereal clouds of tangled onion, each thin sliver delicately coated in crisp batter – a perfect balance of coating and onion, neither overpowering the other. They are among the best things I’ve had from Bombay Brunch, and that’s very high praise considering how excellent everything else is from them.
Another thing worth mentioning right now is that they have a deal with a famous snack and sweet shop in PuNe in India, ChitaLe Bandhu (“Chitale Brothers”) to supply boxed snacks and sweets at the end of August. I can’t speak to the quality of the boxed stuff, but the goods sold in the original CB location are of superb quality. I’ve had stuff from them for close to 60 years. Here are pictures of the store from 2005:
From left to right the captions say “Gulabjam” (Marathi for gulab jamun), “Pista Barfi”, “Badam Barfi” (Pistachio and Almond, respectively).
The transliteration of the consonant व is complex. In the very sign I show above it appears in three different places, pronounced slightly differently in each place. It’s also pronounced differently depending on which brand of Marathi you speak. How best to express it in English?
That’s as far down this particular rabbit hole as I’m prepared to go.
Is it a regional variation? Bengalis don’t really have the ‘V’ sound in the language - it’s always pronounced as ‘B’ - and the ‘W’ sound is expressed differently in writing.
In this documentary series ‘Streets of Gold: Mumbai’, there is a snippet where a well-known elocution coach is trying to get an aspiring beauty queen with sketchy English language skills to pronounce the word ‘village’ correctly. “It’s Village, not Willage!”
But something between a V and a W can be heard in regional speaking. But I’ve never heard it as a as a full W as in English.
As an added twist, the English V is often mispronounced as W – and W as V. Eg “very” becomes “wherry” – not even “werry”, but with aspiration.
Not unlike Bengalis turning V into B and Y into J (in an amusing reversal of this, my Bengali friend’s Hindi-speaking wife switched those two letters in their son’s Bengali-sourced name to the forever distress of the Bengali grandparents who then had to mispronounce a Bengali name… ).
