After exploring the fiery Saoji cuisine, we are out to try the vibrant street foods of Nagpur's Mominpura locality with our gracious host Mandira from Orange Odyssey India. This area boasts of a wide array of old eateries serving their age old iconic recipes. In the last part of this food tour we also relished an impressive cooker biryani.
We started the tour with the Gulgula Hotel that is named after the famous fried snack. It is a soft, fluffy and mildly sweet fried bread made of all purpose flour based leavened dough. People love to have it with tea or milk. The texture reminded us of Mangalorean Buns. Having it hot and fresh right off the oil was indeed a yummy experience.
Next we headed to a non descript shop to have another of Nagpur's unique street food called doodh dabba. It is basically a novel and smart take on the much favoured doodh biscuit or chai biscuit combo. This filling snack consisting of rusk, khari biscuit and bakery biscuit soaked in milk is clearly a convenient version of the above combo. It is served in steel mugs from where the soggy biscuit is scoped out and eaten. The sturdy steel mugs reminded us of a popular Bollywood song. Having the doodh dabba ushered in the nostalgia of having milk and biscuit or chai and biscuit.
Next we visited the busy stall of Haji Mohammad Israel Andewala. The unique name is attributed to the name of the father of the current owner Javed. He can be seen to be totally engrossed in processing the non stop orders. At Mandira's recommendation, we tried the Bun Omelette Chana combo which is essentially a fluffy omelette stuffed bun served with a spicy and tangy white pea curry. The bun omelette tasted great in itself while the white pea curry added a nice layer of flavour to the morsel. The crowd outside the shop was a testimony of its amazing taste.
That was the end of our Mominpura food walk after which we reached Hazrat Tajuddin Baba Dargah. With all the lights and numerous devotees, this place had a festive vibe.
After paying our respect over there we arrived at KGN Biryani Center for Nagpur's famous cooker biryani. Although biryani lovers may argue over whether it qualifies as a biryani or not, its reputation has reached great heights. There we saw the making of this biryani in huge pressure cookers and let's confess that it's no easy feat. One has to be very careful with the steps else the whole batch will get ruined. Taste wise it had the complex and gratifying flavours of a regular biryani but because of the generous use of curd it was slightly tangy.
Overall this food tour was a surprise for our palate and we enjoyed everything.
About the host:
anubhavsapra.com/
**For more such fascinating culinary explorations and stories do subscribe to our channel and follow us on -
Facebook: / delhifoodwalks
Twitter: / delhifoodwalks
Instagram: / delhifoodwalks
Design and filmed by Rahul Singh
/ iamrahulsin. .
Text by Swetaleena Nayak