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Mumbai Xpress, a Good Reason to Stray for a Snack
Mumbai Xpress
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- Mumbai Xpress
- Indian
- $$
- 256-05 Hillside Avenue, Floral Park
- 718-470-0059
The fritters look armored, torpedoes sheathed in tapioca pearls. The outside crackles, but inside the tapioca has gone gooey, clinging and pulling like mochi. It’s a delightful trap: crunch, then sink. The flavors, too, give and take, pulverized peanuts leavened by ginger, sunny lemon pulled down to earth by cumin with its whiff of broken husks.
This is sabudana vada, one of a hundred snacks available at Mumbai Xpress in Floral Park on the eastern edge of Queens, where the buildings are slung low and the sky is unpinned and wide. The nearest subway stop is a half-hour by bus. If you don’t live here, in one of the pretty gabled houses that make you wonder if you’ve crossed city lines, get ready for a journey.
Just for snacks, you say? But there is no “just.” Some of the happiest eating can take place off the table, in stolen moments. At its best, a snack is a tiny act of disruption, a protest against proper meals — the illicit taste that may ruin your dinner.
Mumbai Xpress specializes in chaat, a vast genre of Indian snacks fueled by salt and tang, typically cooked on hot plates at roadside carts and stalls, assembled with bare hands and presented on leaves or in tin bowls or bundled into bouquets of newspaper.
Hina Shah, the chef, and her husband, Mahendra, grew up in Mumbai and immigrated to the United States in 1998 to work in the diamond district of Midtown Manhattan. They settled in Floral Park, part of a steadily growing population of South Asian descent. Ten years ago, they opened Mumbai Xpress after relatives and friends insisted that Ms. Shah’s cooking was too good to keep in her home kitchen.
Here is proof for their argument: dahi batata puri, hollow puffs with delicate shells, cracked at the top as if from little beaks trying to get out. Into the cracks Ms. Shah spoons mashed potatoes and chutneys — one sour-sweet with tamarind and dates, the other loud green from coriander leaves and maddened with chiles. Yogurt follows, to cool everything down.
On top goes chaat masala, a collage of spices haunted by the smoky spoor of black salt; amchur, tart green mango powder; and asafetida, with its faint evocation of meat. Last in are sev, truncated strands of chickpea flour, like deep-fried confetti. Pick up a puff and crush it in a single mouthful, so that every flavor and texture detonates at once.
Here, too, is tokri chaat, crispy potatoes sealed like twigs into a nest, loaded with chickpeas, sprouts, papri (chickpea crackers) and more of those chutneys and yogurt. Ingredients recur, yet somehow no two dishes taste alike.
Many offerings hark back to the chaatwallahs of Chowpatty Beach, overlooking the Arabian Sea, like muthiya, steamed dumplings of shredded long squash, suffused with bittersweet methi (fenugreek) and gingery disks of potato submerged in a ragda (stew) of white lentils. Every morning, Ms. Shah makes bhatura, coarse rounds of bread that arrive half-inflated, for scooping up chickpea curry.
From Mumbai’s chic waterfront neighborhood Breach Candy comes a layer cake of a grilled sandwich built on three slices of white bread slaked with coriander chutney and Amul butter, strong and salty; Amul cheese, comrade-in-arms to Cheddar, grated and half-melted so tendrils droop from the sides like icicles; and mashed potatoes, raw onions and green bell pepper. It is refreshing, but you must surrender your soul to the onions.
The Shahs, who are Jains and do not eat meat, define their mission as “pure vegetarian Indian fast food.” This includes, from farther south, a crispy cobweb of rava dosa, made with a thin batter of semolina that turns to lace in the pan, and Chinese-inflected dishes like gobi Manchurian, cauliflower whose crunch is preserved under a sticky lacquer more sour and hot than sweet.
Some Jains (“very religious people,” Ms. Shah said) also refuse onion, garlic and potatoes. To accommodate them, the Shahs discreetly do away with such ingredients in certain dishes, like sabudana vada, traditionally made with potato.
Other places in town serve chaat, but perhaps none with the same range and single-minded devotion. So the dining room is spartan, with little décor beyond handmade posters listing facts about Mumbai: coastal length, literacy rate, gender ratio. In India, it all comes down to the chaatwallah: the weight of spices in a hand, the torque of a wrist.
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