ITP Indian Travel Places: Food, Travel, Tourism Business Events and Trade Shows
Address: 3,4,5,6 Windsor Chambers, Cawasji Patel Street, Fort Central, Fort, Mumbai
Time: 11.30 am to 11.30 pm
Meals for two: Rs. 1,200
Cuisines: Asian, Vietnamese, Korean, Thai, Sushi
Facilities: Home Delivery, Vegetarian Only, Full Bar Available, Valet Parking Available, Serves Jain Food, Wifi, Buffet
Bangkok Street is the new kid on a very old block. Its neighbours are Yazdani Bakery, Jimmy Boy, Punjabi Moti Halwai, the triumvirate of Ankur-Apoorva-Mahesh and Sadya superstar Hotel Deluxe. This is the historic legal and banking district of Mumbai — and over the decades, its functional homestyle eating joints have become dining legends. It’s also a neighbourhood that’s recently rediscovered it can be cool — Starbucks showed up a few years ago, and there’s that clutch of hip places around Kala Ghoda.
The neighbourhood’s latest eatery aims to be a little bit of both — practical but cool, cheap and cheerful but contemporary. All this fence-sitting also means that 38 Bangkok Street (38BS) is sometimes neither here nor there. There are lovely large windows, the booths are comfy and roomy; but the LED lighting makes food look greyed and washed out. Despite the restaurant’s name, the all-vegetarian menu is not derived from a specific address. The soup section, for example, has representatives from Thailand, China, Tibet, Burma, Malaysia, and Japan. Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, follow right after in the grills, and this pan-Asian whirl continues through the rest of the pages.
For anyone who enjoys Indian-Chinese food, this is familiar stuff, but more ambitious. It’s tasty in an unsophisticated inauthentic way, and from the families packing in the tables, it seems to work. Cases in point: there is paneer in Malaysian sambal bajak chilli paste, and our stir-fried soba were more like street-side Hakka noodles than those made with nutty Japanese buckwheat. Both the crunchy java lotus stems with ginger, garlic, green onions, as well the mixed mushrooms with (not quite) mirin were over-seasoned, but satisfyingly textural. Better those than the indistinguishable lumps of beige that showed up in our assorted dumpling basket.
