Dadar Ranade Road Maharashtrian Snack Lane

Ranade Road runs west from the Kabutarkhana pigeon plaza outside Dadar West station towards Shivaji Park, and for a few hundred metres it is as close as Mumbai comes to a Marathi high street.

• Named for the nineteenth-century social reformer Mahadev Govind Ranade, it is lined with saree shops, Marathi book stalls, brassware and puja-goods traders, and, threaded between them, the small, bright, family-run snack houses that give the lane its reputation.
• Dadar is the city's old middle-class heart, and this street still eats like it.
• The vocabulary here is Maharashtrian rather than pan-Indian.
• Misal pav arrives as a bowl of sprouted-bean curry under a slick of red tarri, with farsan, raw onion and a soft pav to tear into it; batata vada is potato mashed with green chilli and ginger, gram-flour battered and fried to order.
• Thalipeeth, the multigrain griddle bread eaten with white butter, belongs to the morning; kothimbir vadi, a steamed coriander-and-gram-flour cake cut into diamonds and shallow-fried, belongs to the evening.
• Sabudana vada and sabudana khichdi appear year-round but rule during fasting weeks.
• To finish, ask for piyush, the thick saffron-and-cardamom drink thinned from shrikhand, or a tumbler of kokum-pink solkadhi. Come on foot.
• The lane is narrow, the footpaths are part shopfront, and the two rushes, breakfast until about eleven and then four to eight in the evening, are when it is at its best and its most crowded.
• Dadar station, on both the Western and Central suburban lines, is the obvious arrival point, roughly a ten-minute walk away.
• Combine the walk with Shivaji Park at the western end, or with the wholesale flower market that works itself out before dawn near the station.
• Monsoon months make the pavements slow going, and festival weeks around Ganesh Chaturthi and Gudi Padwa bring queues at every counter.
• Dadar and neighbouring Matunga form one of the strongest pure-vegetarian belts in Mumbai, but the city at large is a seafood and meat-eating one and the two kinds of kitchen often share a street, so read the board before you sit down: look for a shuddha shakahari or pure-veg sign, and ask at the counter if none is displayed.
• Aaswad, at the Gadkari Chowk end near Shivaji Park, and Prakash Upahar Kendra on nearby Gokhale Road are long-standing Maharashtrian vegetarian kitchens for misal, thalipeeth and piyush; confirm the pure-veg board on arrival, as menus change.
• A short ride north, Matunga's Udupi coffee houses do dosa, idli and filter coffee, again worth a quick check at the door.
• Jain travellers should ask for no onion and no garlic when ordering, since most Maharashtrian snacks use both, and should confirm that potato and other root vegetables can be left out.