Our Mumbai 2024 Journal
There’s a particular kind of electricity that hits you the moment you step off a plane in Mumbai. It’s not just the heat, or the noise, or the assault of colour and diesel and jasmine that greets you on the drive in. It’s something older than all of that. A feeling that the city is already in motion, has always been in motion, and you are simply catching up.
Every so often, we take the team to India. Not as a jolly. Not as a research trip, exactly, though it is that too. We come because Kricket was born from time spent here, and because the food we cook every day in London deserves to be held up to the light of its source. We come to taste things we can’t fully remember until we’re tasting them again.
What we ate
The itinerary of a Kricket Mumbai trip is, essentially, an itinerary of eating. We make no apologies for this.
Swati Snacks, tucked into the chaos of Nariman Point, was our first proper meal. Simple, vegetarian, perfect, the kind of Gujarati street snacks that remind you how much complexity can live in something the size of your palm. Pani puri. Sev puri. A cold glass of something sweet. We were back.
Trishna came that evening. The crab. Always the crab. Some restaurants define a city’s relationship with a single ingredient, and Trishna does that with seafood. The butter garlic sauce alone is worth the flight.
A lie-in on Monday felt earned. By lunchtime, we were at Shree Thakar Bhojanalay, one of the most quietly extraordinary places to eat in all of Mumbai. A Gujarati thali operation on Dadiseth Agiary Lane that’s been feeding the city for decades. Dishes keep coming. You stop counting. You stop trying to identify everything and simply surrender to the rhythm of it.
Monday evening took us to MSK for a Khasi meal. We’d arranged this ourselves, and it was important: the food of Meghalaya, brought south. Fermented, smoky, funky in the best sense. Food that sits outside of what most people expect of India, which is exactly why we needed to eat it.
Tuesday: The Long Day
We set the alarm for 5am and nobody complained.
Sassoon Docks at dawn is one of those experiences you can’t quite prepare people for. The fishing boats are in. The ice. The fish landing in great slithering cascades onto the stone. Cats everywhere. The smell enormous and unignorable and, after a while, oddly beautiful. We stayed until the light changed.
Then: the Sorting Area of News, the Flower Market, Matunga’s Madras Café for breakfast and filter coffee, the Dhobi Ghatt, Mumbai’s vast open-air laundry, row upon row of concrete wash pens and lines of colour, and onward into the lanes of the Spice Bazaar and the half-organised chaos of Chor Bazaar, the city’s famous antiques and salvage market.
The kitchen team peeled off at noon to begin prep at MSK. The rest of us took the train out to visit Apne Aap Women’s Collective, an organisation working with marginalised women across India, including in Mumbai’s red-light districts. It was a reminder of the other city that exists inside the one that dazzles you. We wanted to see it. We’re glad we did.
Street food for dinner. We ate standing up, from paper plates, from the counters of places with no names, and it was, as it always is, precisely right.
The Events
Wednesday and Thursday were given over to prep and service at MSK, our own events, cooked by us, in the city that made us. There is something both grounding and destabilising about cooking Indian food in India. The ingredients are different. The expectations are different. The confidence you feel in your own kitchen gives way to something more like humility, and that’s the point.
Dinner at Bademiya one night, the legendary grilled-meat institution that spills out into the street, and the following evening, deep into Mohammed Ali Road for Ramzan-style food eaten late, at a counter, with strangers. This is the education that doesn’t fit in a book.
The End of Things
Friday took us to Table, a farm outside the city, for a long lunch in the afternoon heat. Produce grown, produce eaten, the gap between them almost nothing.
Saturday: Dharavi. Often written about badly, usually by people passing through. We took a proper tour, two hours, through the city-within-a-city where an enormous proportion of Mumbai’s informal economy operates, the leather workshops, the plastic recycling operations, the pottery quarter. Overwhelming in scale and ingenuity. We left thinking differently.
Lunch at Soam, a beautiful, calm Gujarati restaurant on Babulnath that feels like a palate cleanser in every sense. Afternoon free. Then one last dinner at Bombay Canteen, where old Indian recipes meet new Indian ambition, and which always feels like the right note to end on.
We flew home on Sunday night.
