The Bombay Canteen in Lower Parel came into being in 2015, making an unequivocal statement that India’s regional cuisine, in all its unique and underrepresented diversity, was the most fascinating thing happening in the kitchen anywhere in the nation. Ten years on, the point has been proved, but it has been proved thanks to The Bombay Canteen.
The People Who Built It
The Bombay Canteen was established by Floyd Cardoz in partnership with Yash Bhanage, Sameer Seth, and Thomas Zacharias under the brand of Hunger Inc. Hospitality. The group reunited to focus their talents on performing on a world stage in New York, then returned to Mumbai.
Floyd Cardoz was a chef who was born in Goa and grew up in Mumbai, but trained in New York and went on to establish himself as an expert in Indian cooking in the US. Cardoz was the winner of Top Chef Masters. Cardoz was the only person of color to be promoted to Chef de Cuisine by the famous chef, Gray Kunz. He opened Tabla in New York and defined what Indian cooking can be in a world-class dining environment. Floyd Cardoz came back to India to create The Bombay Canteen, bringing 20 years of international experience and the belief that the issue with how India’s cuisine was represented did not lie in the cuisine itself, but in the story.
The kitchen’s chef and manager until 2022, when he left to set up the platform Locavore, Thomas Zacharias hailed from Le Bernardin of New York. He was, as he claimed, a strong proponent of regional Indian cuisine and one who would remember everything that had gone into making every meal at the restaurant – a festival with the grandmother, a childhood kitchen, a region-specific ingredient that most other restaurants did not even consider using.
The Building and the Room
The Bombay Canteen is located in the Kamala Mills Compound in Lower Parel, in a setting that evokes Mumbai’s bungalow style, with stone walls, glass windows, and high ceilings. This space is large but cozy, a deliberate effort to be family-friendly in an age where fancy dining rooms were increasingly exclusive and minimalist.
According to The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, which features it in its Discoveries list, the interior is “vast and inspired by Mumbai’s heritage bungalows.” The restaurant is designed to adapt over time and is meant to be a casual place for lunch, drinks after work, dinner on weekends, and a family place altogether.
The Menu: Regional India on a Seasonal Plate
India-inspired cuisine at The Bombay Canteen can be described using the restaurant’s own words as cuisine inspired by India, which reflects itself in a constantly changing menu based not only on a small number of dishes that Indian restaurants in Mumbai have offered for years, but also seasonally changing dishes with ingredients from all corners of the country.
Many dishes quickly became icons of the restaurant. For example, Eggs Kejriwal was inspired by a traditional dish of Mumbai’s Willingdon Sports Club. Or Chettinad Prawns Ali-Yolio, introducing the spices used in the traditional cuisine of Tamil Nadu. Goan Beef Olives. Chili Calamari charcoal grill. Completely remade bar menu inspired by the cinematic history of Bombay, offering a cocktail for each film. The bar won India’s Best Resto Bar award, and Asia’s 50 Best Bars voted it No. 70 in 2023.
Chef of the Year in the same year when The Bombay Canteen made it to CNT’s Top 50 Restaurants in India, Condé Nast Traveler India awarded Chef Hussain Shahzad, who previously worked with a team mentored by Floyd Cardoz and now runs the kitchen of The Bombay Canteen.
The Awards
The Bombay Canteen was founded in 2015. Ten years later, the restaurant has earned itself the accolade of being named the Best Indian Restaurant in the World Culinary Awards, among other restaurants such as Indian Accent, Masque, and Masala Library. It has received recognition from Tatler Asia and is listed in the World’s 50 Best Discovery list. The restaurant’s menu changes seasonally. Every year, the dining room gets crowded with people who have come to eat one particular dish but end up discovering three others.
What It Started
The greatest achievement of the Bombay Canteen is not a dish. It is a path. In the restaurant’s early years, the prevailing narrative around Indian cuisine in high-end settings was either of French-inspired tasting menus or standard northern curries. The Bombay Canteen told the story through each plate that the raw materials and culinary traditions of every state of India, whether it be Ladakh or Tamil Nadu, Arunachal Pradesh or Maharashtra, deserved to be placed in front of a diner and allowed to speak for itself.
In his final years, Floyd Cardoz explained the goal of the restaurant, “We began to search for lesser-known regional cuisines and cooking methods. In doing so, we found things that most of our customers liked, but some considered weird. But our quest for regional diversity continued nevertheless.”
He passed away in March 2020. The establishment he co-created celebrates its tenth birthday and opens Papa’s, a twelve-seater fine dining restaurant, named in his honor and located opposite his childhood house. The Bombay Canteen follows the path laid by Floyd and keeps searching for new things to add to its menu. While the menu changed several times, the goal remained unchanged.
