Mumbai Xpress

It's an Indian grilled cheese sandwich, sort of.

This vegetarian snack shop calls it a Mumbai grilled sandwich ($5.99), though if you ordered one from a street vendor in the former Bombay, surely you'd ask for it by another name. The two savory layers sport mild cheese, thin-sliced potato, and onion, but the color and the zing come from coriander chutney.

It arrived at the table in neat quarters that are less prim than tea sandwiches but nearly as manageable. Not so the special pav bhaji (Pow Bodg-ee; $6.99), a pair of warm, buttery sliced buns (the pav) and a pool of thin vegetable curry (the bhaji) served with butter and garnishes of coriander, tomato, and onion. Since our waiter didn't deliver it himself, my dining buddy and I were at a loss: Should we dip the pav? Spread the bhaji on top? Much later our waiter told us that people eat the dish every which way; some nibble at the pav in one hand while spooning up bhaji with the other. That's how we'd cleaned our plate, I told him, though by that time I was on my third napkin.

Mumbai Xpress
256-05 Hillside Ave., Floral Park, Queens
718-470-0059
Closed Monday

Comments

[steve koppelman]

Taj Delhi Chaat, one of the stalls in that midtown convenience-store/food-court on 6th Ave. around 37th St., serves a cold, cheeseless version of the Bombay Sandwich. Onions, boiled potato, beets and cucumber on sliced white bread with coriander chutney and margarine. The counterman carefully trims the crusts off the bread and slices it into six pieces. In this form it's unmistakably descended from those English tea sandwiches.

A coworker/street-food-aficionado hailing from India does indeed call it a "Bombay sandwich".

As for pau bhaji, I've now had a couple of versions with varying coarseness to the veg curry. Piling a mess of it with garnishes on each half a roll (and ordering an extra couple of rolls) seems to be my carb-crazed coworker's preferred mode of consumption.

[Todd]

In Bombay they dip the rolls into the sauce as if they were roti.