Items like bacon vada pav, baked dahi bhalla and bread pakoda chaat are creatively dotting the menus. Inspired by sushi bars, modern Indian eatery Rock Salt has created a fancy paani-puri bar. It serves the popular desi dumplings of gratification with new-age fillings like crab masala, tandoori paneer, chicken 65, lamb hummus and avocado salsa.
Accompanying water menu includes kokum sour, masala chaas and spiced gazpacho besides traditional jaljeera. The bar dishes out dessert pani-puri with fillings like motichoor laddoo and Mysore pak.
Mexican food specialist Vikas Seth is wielding his cooking spatula to rediscover Indian street food too. At the byinvite club called BLVD, he serves avant-garde street food like molecular beetroot tikki, dhokla with spiced coriander foam to steamed dahi bhalla. Seth’s food truck stationed at a coworking space on Residency Road sells bread-pakoda chaat and baked kulcha with chole, seen humbly in the khaugallis of Amritsar. “The appetiser is where all the creativity and innovation lies,” notes Seth.
It’s Mumbai’s street food that has Mohit Balachandran, country head-cuisine for SodaBottleOpenerWala, hooked. The menu at this Iranian eatery thus serves a bacon vada pav and a carnivorous bhel which is essentially a bhel puri with ham, bacon and chicken. “Street food should carry its quintessential simplicity into the fine-dine space” says he.
Food expert Suresh Hinduja is working on an upgraded version of Bombay Sandwich with sourdough bread for many restaurants. “The crossover of street food to fine dine restaurants was just waiting to happen. For long, consumers and critics have ignored this segment, perhaps because of its omnipresence right from our growing years,” says a delighted Hinduja.