More food porn: Noor Mohammadi Hotel in Mumbai (a must-eat if you're in the city)

So last night my wife and I took a friend of hers who was visiting out to one of our favorite dive-y places in Mumbai, Noor Mohammadi Hotel. ("Hotel" means "restaurant"; "guest house" means "hotel" here.)

If you're even in Mumbai and want some "authentic" (yeah, I roll my eyes at that word too, but you know what I mean) Indian food, this is the place to go. It's in Bhendi Bazar, at the southwest corner of the Dongri neighborhood. We did iftar there once during Eid and it was some of the best food I've ever had. Mumbai is a city of micro-neighborhoods, a lot like NYC, and this one is also called "Little Pakistan" by Mumbaikars. It's nearly 100% Muslim. When we went for iftar we got there just before prayers got out and the streets were absolutely empty; within ten minutes it was the most packed place I have ever been in my life (and that includes Queens and Istanbul).

It's kind of the dirty little secret of Indian restaurants in America that they actually serve Pakistani cuisine; most proprietors are Muslim, and the cuisine is distinctly Mughlai: chunks of meat and/or veg either roasted in a tandoor or in a very fatty ghee and chili sauce (ghee is clarified butter; we will return to it shortly). So, while I always recommend that people branch out and try Indian regional cuisines that don't make it very often into American restaurants (Gujarati pure-veg, Goan, Bengali fish, etc.), if you were looking for the best representation of what you probably think of as "Indian food", Noor Mohammadi Hotel is about the best you'll find in the world.

So here goes:



First up was an appetizer, chicken tikka. Unlike in American restaurants, it's almost universally served bone-in here. The spice coating is chili powder, turmeric, cumin, cardamom, and ground coriander. The chicken is roasted in a charcoal tandoor and then served in a "bath" of ghee and the pan drippings from the roasting.



Next up is the house specialty of Noor, Sanju Baba chicken. It was a recipe given to the owner by Bollywood superstar and notorious gangster Sanjay Dutt. Dutt is currently serving the eighth year of a five-year sentence (he keeps getting out on work release to make movies so the sentence keeps getting extended) in the infamous Arthur Road Jail next door to my apartment for gunrunning. (Ways India is different from the US: the liquor store across the street from the jail takes orders to deliver to the inmates.)

Sanju Baba chicken is not a traditional preparation, and I'm not entirely sure what's in it. The chicken is all drumsticks, and it doesn't seem to be pre-roasted, but rather cooked in the gravy. The gravy is definitely ghee, chili, and cardamom, but there's some other spice I still can't place. Nutmeg, maybe? It seems to be slow-simmered or seethed in the gravy.



Next up is my favorite. Don't judge. It's goat marrow curry. The goat bones are boiled and the marrow is extracted, and then it is mixed in with a ghee-chili-cardamom-turmeric mix. This is food invented for the dockworkers of Mumbai back in the day who needed a lot of fat and protein with every meal. It's probably too heavy for everyday eating for the rest of us.



To sop up these glutinous gravies, we get a nonstop supply of rotis, a flatbread like the famous naan but crisper (they're cooked on the sides of the tandoors). They have a much more extensive bread selection, but we were there very early (8pm; most Mumbaikars have supper at 11pm or so) and they hadn't been baked yet. All-day dining is a rather alien concept in India and it's pretty much only the foreign restaurants that offer it. Noor, for instance, is open from 11 am to 3 pm, and then from 7:30 pm to 1 am (with different menus and staff for the two meals).



Noor is obviously a Muslim restaurant (the name should make that clear), so a beer was out of the question. Instead I got a soda. I had hoped to get a Thums Up, the national soda of India, but they were out this week. So a Seven Up had to do.



After dinner we went to a nearby sweet shop. Pretty much all Indian desserts are built along a single theory: take sweetened condensed milk, add saffron and some other spices, and then either further condense it or fry it. It's a ticket to diabetes, but damn it's good.