Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Edible City
At the intersection of city memoir, food culture, recipes, and lyrical photography lies Mumbai: A Journey through its Kitchens, Streets, and Stories. Published by Sri Bodanapu, Heirloom 2025, this book will stir nostalgia in those who have lived in Mumbai, and enchant those who haven’t.
For anyone who has called Mumbai home, movement and sensory overload are constants. This book distills that energy. Stripped of sound and motion, its photographs and design still pulse with the city’s restless rhythm. And everywhere, there is food. It is a metropolis built by immigrants, where long working hours and diverse communities have shaped a dining culture of bhojnalayas, tiffin carriers, and more than 10,000 restaurants and cafés.
Essays by local writers
The essays by local writers, curated by Rushina Munshaw Ghildiyal, are grouped into sections on culinary history, recipes, and stories. They flow into one another like spices stirred into a pot. ‘The First Indian City’ provides historical grounding, while ‘Hands that Feed’ offers a personal memoir of cooks, street markets, and dabbawallas. Soon, we learn about the Pathare Prabhu community and how they make Mutton Gode along with a sambhar masala quite unlike its southern cousins.
Mumbai’s Foodscape
The book takes us through Mumbai’s foodscape: the chai–nashta rituals across communities, the bustle of Crawford Market and Dadar’s wholesale lanes, the fiery offerings of Bhajji Gali, the bottled masalas of East Indians, and recipes from Konkani Muslims. Ramzan feasts at Mohammed Ali Road, nostalgic mawa cakes, delicate macarons, Parsi delicacies, desi Chinese, and iconic street food (the gola photograph nearly leaps off the page)—all evoke the city’s edible soul.
Each essayist captures Mumbai from a unique vantage point, whether through fish markets, community kitchens, eat streets, continental cuisine, nightlife, or the city’s eclectic drinking culture. Mumbai started as seven fishing villages or Koliwadas (a home open to the sea). From the essay on seafood, Rushina shares:
‘Stepping into one of them, especially Worli Koliwada, is like taking a journey back in time. It’s hard to believe that this area has existed in the heart of Mumbai for more than eight centuries! But climb the seventeenth-century fort right to the top, look over the village and further towards Mahim, Bandra, and the iconic Bandra-Worli Sea link- this is where the Bombay of yesteryear and today’s Mumbai meet. Nestled in the heart of Mumbai, it feels worlds away from the modern city. As I walk the narrow winding lanes, past ancient temples and iconic churches, the syncretic nature of the area is evident. Go further, past women selling coconuts, flowers, and fresh fish to see Koli men cleaning and repairing fishing nets down at the pier- its tip protruding into the sea.
Scores of fishing boats with names varying from Laxmi to Queen Mary, evil eyes painted on their bows, bobbing in the foreground, flags fluttering wildly as the mighty sea-link broods down at them.’
A journey full of discoveries
Reading the essays, for me, a foodie Mumbaikar for over two decades, was a journey full of discoveries. Like this Worli Fort that I missed despite driving through there every week. Mumbai forces us to pattern our movements on the time and traffic axis. In this book, the writers’ collective gives a drone vision of the city that zooms in every now and then to show the nuances of something ordinary yet making it precious – where to find the best fish, how to bargain, how to cook, and how to enjoy the multicultural ways of savoring the same fish. The struggles of the Kolis did that for me. I lived next to them in Cuffe Parade and Madh Island, but I learnt more about them in a single chapter of this book.
The recipes are shaped with the people behind them – before you meet the ingredients, you meet the history, the community, and the person. They carry a promise of a culinary adventure.
Mumbai’s vibrant sauciness
The photographs by Bhavya Pansari capture the vibrant sauciness of Mumbai- there is often a vehicle on the move or a person or a mid-action hand in her pictures portraying the way the city is – always mobile, always doing, no space for a pause.
The design and illustrations echo Mumbai’s bold shopfronts and billboards, stamped with its sights, sounds, and smells. Mumbai is more than a coffee table book—it’s a sensory immersion, a celebration of a city forever hungry and always feeding.
- ASIN : B0FC63BXJ8
- Publisher : Heirloom Project
- Publication date : May 20, 2025
- Edition : First Edition
- Print length : 392 pages
- ISBN-13 : 979-8992538397