Fish Thali, Raw Mango Soda & More: How Churchgate Khao Galli Won Us Over

Khao gallis, albeit self-explanatory, are one of our favourite bits of Mumbai – narrow streets brimming with food stalls and new and exciting dishes. After a harrowing day at work, we decided to snoop around at the Churchgate khao galli, put on our detective boots, and here are the best dishes that our investigations yielded.
How to get there: Get out from the East side of Churchgate station and keep walking towards the Income Tax office, it will be in a lane to your right. Also, you can ask vendors along the way for the khao galli, and they will help you out. Most stalls here open at around 8am and run till 9pm.

At the Ganesh Dosa Centre stall, they make 4 idlis for INR 30, mysore sada and masala dosas and what we tried – a cheese stuffed uttapam. After making a thick uttapam base and sprinkling it with onion and a dollop of butter, these guys at the end go unabashedly with their cheese sprinkling and fold the uttapam over by 2, so that the cheese melts inside. It was quite delicious and made for an unusual eat.

Price: INR 55

A stall before you enter the lane with the khao galli has Duke’s lemonades and soda bottles lined outside its kart, and he is swishing bottles into another to make all kinds of sodas and sherbets. What we love and found most unusual was the kachchi kairi soda {raw mango}. He mixed a sherbet wit the flavouring into a soda bottle, adding ice and small bits of rock salt and gave it to us. You must try it out too.

Price: INR 20

#LBBTip: He only sits here from morning till 8pm, so you will miss his stall if you come after that.

The Sai Shabri fast food stall has an insanely long list of sandwich types, and we recommend you skip past the long list and go straight for the samosa grill sandwiches. We picked the one with cheese {obviously}, and they flattened an aloo samosa, stuffed the sandwich with cheese, added really nice and spicy green chutney and served this sandwich to us, cut in small squares.

Price: INR 90

A seemingly simple dish, we can’t resist getting our hands on it wherever we go, and having had plenty of it in life we can testify that not all places know how to make the pani right. At Saddal Bhel Puri wala’s we picked a plate of pani puri, and loved the flavour of the water as it had the right amount of spice, pudina and salt mixed in it.

Price: INR 20 for 6 pieces

This one came as the real surprise here. Having traversed through khao gallis a plenty in Mumbai, we were surprised to see the sheer variety of thalis they had on offer – chicken, bhaja, fish, mutton, etc. The fish thali was so delicious, it made this trip worth it. It was served with rice, a boneless fish, two types of curry and onion and our meat-eating colleagues were smacking their lips by the time they were done. A definite recommendation for seafood lovers.

Price: INR 70