INDIAN CHAAT IN AMERICA
Sharma says, is a social act with the same casual
Manhattan has lately been seized by a craze for Indian
snacks, with upscale new places like Spice Marker,
Bombay Talkie, Von Singh’s, Devi, Lassi and Babu all
claiming that Indian street food is their inspiration. Many
of them adapt well to New York-style eating on the run,
especially flatbreads like parantha and chapattis wraps
like dosa rolls and Bombay Frankies (a roti wrapped
around tandoori chicken). Asking Indians in America
about chaat, India’s national snacks, is like asking
American about burgers: the word unleashes unbearable
cravings, nostalgia and homesickness.” I remember
going to Kwality. Snacks for papri chaat when I was a
boy,” said Gandar Narsi, 74 a retired New York City taxi
driver, who moved from Delhi in 1955. “Nothing will
ever taste like that again.” Taste good chaat, and you
understand why it is not soon forgotten. Chaats are
jumbles of flavor and texture: sweet, sour, salty, spicy,
crunchy, soft, nutty, fried and flaky tidbits doused with
cool yogurt, fresh cilantro and tangy tamarind and
sprinkled with chaat masala, a spice mixture that is itself
wildly eventful. The contrasts are, as one fan said, “a
steeplechase for your mouth,” with different sensations
galloping by faster than you can track them.
All Indians in America are homesick for the same thing,
says Mitra Choudhary, a software engineer from Gujrat,
who lives in Fort Collins, Colo. “There is no chaat here
only curries,” he said. But this has finally changed in the
New York region. In Jersey City the Little India strip on
Neward Avenue is lined with places for chaats and
sweets, while only one restaurant serves the rich curries
familiar to most Americans as Indian food. (Indians call
those dishes Punjabi, after Punjab, the northern region
where they originated from). In Jackson Heights,
Queens, signs for new chaat menus flutter from many
awnings reflecting, according to Sanjiv Mody (an owner
of Rajbhog Foods) a growing insistence by Indians in
America on the authentic foods of home.
All over India, chaatwallahs, snacks vendors, ply their
trade from street carts or small storefronts. Like New
York’s hot dog vendors they are ubiquitous in parks, at
train stations, in busy shopping streets. Chowpatty
Beach in Mumbai (the former Bombay) is famous all over
India for the quality and variety of its chaats. Some
chaats are light and crunchy, like an ethereally flavored
snacks mix, and others are practically lunch, like samosa
chaat: piping hot samosa split open and covered with
spicy chick peas, minced onion and cilantro, yogurt and
tamarind. Chaats are mixed to your specifications
(spicier, not so much cilantro, extra chickpeas), handed
over on a banana leaf and devoured instantly.
“Chaats are like every flavor of chips and every kind of
pizza you have here.” Said Dave Sharma, an owner of
Amma, a Midtown restaurant, who is from Mumbai. “We
eat chaat whenever we have a small hunger, but we will
travel miles to get good one. And people are loyal to
their favorites.”
Some legendary chaatwallahs like Vital Bhelwala in
Mumbai, have occupied the same space or patch of
sidewalk for generations. Mumbai and Mr. Bhelwala in
particular are famous for bhelpuri, a puffed-rice chaat
with bits of mint and potato.” We say that the flavor of
the chaat is in the chaatwalah’s hands.” Mr. Sharma said,
“And it’s true, literally and figuratively.” Chaats can be
made with almost anything crispy: fried bits of
chickpeas, puffed rice, peanuts, moong bean sprouts and
spice-dusted toasted lentils. Chaat masala usually
includes amchoor, a tangy powder made from green
mangoes, mint, cumin and pomegranate, but it must
always include kala namak, a black salt with a pleasant
whiff of sulfur, vital to chaat lovers. Going for chaat, Mr.
sociability as going for beer.(Most Indians are Hindus
and Muslims and drink little or no alcohol) “After work a
group of men will buy each other rounds of men chaat on
the way to the train and sometimes even have
competition over who can eat more.” Piyush Sukhadia,
an owner of chaat-and sweet stores, said, “In India a
guy might have a Mercedes and live in a house on hill,
but he still puts on his slipper and goes to eat chaat.”
The word chaat means “to lick”, in Hindi, says Mr.
Sukhadia, whose family business was established in
1890, when his great-great-grandfather received the
title of official sweet maker to the Nawab of Cambay in
southern Gujrat. He said that although chaats used to be
considered humble food with a taint of the street, it is
now fashionable in India and here to offer a chaat station
even at elegant weddings.
To that end Sandip Patel, the owner of Chowpatty Foods,
one of the first houses in the United States, has just
imported a chaat cart from India in the red-and-white
color scheme of the Chowpatty chaatwalahs. Chowpatty
is the biggest chaat-and-sweet specialist in the Oak
Tree Road neighborhood of Iselin, N.J., which lures
thousand of Indian-American consumers as far as
Philadelphia and Boston to shop and snack every
weekend. Oak tree Road serves knowledgeable clientele
and has a best quality sweets and chaats in the region:
all the major manufacturers have shops there, and even
amateurs like Shalimar and Galaxy Food Court serve
lively chaats with startlingly fresh flavors. On Oak Tree
Road you will see the ingredients for chaats divided in
rows of stainless-steel bins, but a traditional chaatwalah
sits surrounded by his mounts of dry ingredients and
bowls of yogurt, chaat masala, cilantro or mint chutney
and tamarind chutney and his own mix of jalzeera, the
“firewater” that is used to fill the habit-forming
paanipuri.
“I just got back from India, and I was eating sixty or
seventy paanipuris a day,” Mr. Patel says. A fine tribute
to paanipuri appears in a 1991 memoir about Mumbai by
Ganghdar Gopal Gadgil. After several thousand words
describing the process of eating and experiencing
paanipuri, he concludes with his tribute to the afterglow
that, as I can attest, follows are paanipuri binge: “In the
state of beatitude the Maharshtrian stop being surely,
the marwaries look at the millions of stars without being
reminded of their own millions, the Sindhis admires the
horizon without any intention of selling it, the Gujratis
speculate on the moon instead of the scrips they should
have sold, the North Indians dream of things other than
Hindi as the official language of the United Nation, and
even the Parsi ladies stop nagging their husband.”