Hill Road Bargain Bazaar Strip

Hill Road is the older, narrower sibling of Linking Road, and plenty of Bandra regulars will tell you it is the more interesting one.

• The street runs west from the junction near Bandra railway station towards the sea-facing Bandstand end, and for most of that stretch both pavements form a continuous bargain bazaar.
• Glass-fronted showrooms are the exception here.
• What you get instead are hole-in-the-wall boutiques barely two metres wide, trim and haberdashery shops selling buttons, zips, lace and sequins by the metre, stalls with sandals and chappals stacked to head height, and racks of cotton kurtas, scarves, bags, belts and costume jewellery pushed out onto the kerb until the walkway all but vanishes.
• Shopping here is a contact sport, and it rewards patience.
• The street stalls expect a negotiation — open well below the asking price, be ready to walk away, and settle somewhere in the middle; the small shops behind them usually work at fixed or near-fixed prices, so read the room before you haggle.
• There are rarely fitting rooms, returns are seldom possible, and quality swings wildly from one stall to the next, so check stitching and soles before you pay.
• Carry small notes as well as a UPI app, keep your bag in front of you in the evening crush, and give yourself longer than you think: the good finds are usually three shops past the point where you were ready to give up.
• The other half of Hill Road's appeal is what sits just off it.
• Duck into the lanes on the southern side — Waroda Road, Chapel Road, Veronica Street and the old village quarter of Ranwar — and the noise drops away within a block.
• These are low Bandra cottages with tiled roofs, external staircases, wrought-iron balconies and shaded verandahs, many of them a century or more old and several now sharing walls with large painted murals.
• Mehboob Studio, a working film studio that has stood on the road for decades, anchors the middle of the strip.
• A slow loop through these lanes and back out to the shops is an easy, and entirely free, hour.
• Bandra is not a vegetarian neighbourhood by default — a great many kitchens here cook meat, seafood and egg — so the rule on Hill Road is to look for a board that says pure vegetarian and to confirm at the counter before ordering, rather than assume.
• That said, eating veg here is entirely doable.
• Udupi-style counters near the station end turn out idli, medu vada, sambar and paper dosa from early morning; Gujarati and Jain thali kitchens in the surrounding lanes will often cook without onion and garlic if you ask in advance; and juice bars and sandwich stands along the strip will make a vegetable toastie, though do ask them to skip egg mayonnaise.
• For an unambiguously pure-veg sit-down meal, a short Western line ride south to Matunga's long-established South Indian dining rooms is the local answer.