It’s been 20 years since I was last at SC Karkerar’s iconic Mahesh Lunch Home. Established in 1977, offering Mangalorean seafood dishes for the first time to Mumbaikars back then, Mahesh Lunch Home seemed to have climbed higher and higher in terms of sheer quality of cooking and its super-efficient service.
Our dinner last night was a revelation - we ordered from the menu and our waiter promptly showed us our live seafood orders table side - they are as fresh as they come: a gargantuan live crab, and some tiger prawns.
Our dinner consisted of:
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Mahesh Lunch Home’s signature must-order: the butter garlic crab. Once you’ve had the sweet-fleshed, meaty crab here, you won’t be satisfied from those anywhere else!
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Prawn Gassi, served with appam - the prawns had a “butter chicken” kind of look and colour tone, but the rich coconutty-shellfish flavours were stupendous. Mangalorean cooking has higher levels of chili than Mughlai cooking, so the chili hit came as a shock to our palate.
The Mangalorean appam were robust and heavy, unlike the moist, delicate Sri Lankan or Keralan appams which we’re more used to. Still, the perfect accompaniment to the prawn gassi dish.
- Butter chicken - we ordered this dish, thinking we’re going to get the smokey, rich, creamy dish that we loved.
However, the rendition here bore no resemblance to the butter chicken we know - instead, it was an aggressively spiced chicken dish with audacious levels of chili, onions and garlic. Tasty, no doubt, but not what we expected!
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Neer dosa - lacy thin crepes - the name translates to “water crepes” - were a good accompaniment to the curried dishes we ordered.
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Mahesh Special Vegetables was a pretty-looking combination of mild, creamy navratan korma and super-spicy kolhapuri. Best vegetable dish I’d ever had in any Indian restaurant anywhere!
I’d always enjoyed my visits to Mahesh Lunch Home - twenty years ago as now. In the intervening decades, the service had become more crisp and polished, whilst the cooking displayed the kind of confidence which assured diners we are tasting some of the best efforts to come out of the kitchen.
Address
Mahesh Lunch Home
Ground Floor, WRMM+G8P Life Insurance Building, 8-B, Cawasji Patel Rd, near Mumbai, Fort, Mumbai, Maharashtra 400001, India
Tel: +91 22 2202 3965
Opening hours: 11.30am-3.45pm, 6pm-11.45pm Monday to Saturday
11.30am-3.45pm, 7pm-11.45pm Sunday