Mumbai Masala

Our place is right on Hill Road in Dadar West. It’s a very busy street, and the noise from the honking cars is basically the soundtrack to our workday. We start our shift by checking the bags of spices and making sure the kitchen burners are working right. The space is fairly narrow, so we’re always bumping into each other when the orders start piling up. Most of the people who eat here are just passing through on their way to the station or finishing up some shopping. We don’t have much room for storage, so we get fresh supplies delivered almost every day. The walls could probably use a fresh coat of paint, but we’re usually too busy serving food to worry about that. There is a lot of steam in the air from the big pots, and it gets pretty sweaty in the back during the summer months. We keep a ledger on the counter for the daily accounts, and the pen is always going missing. Sometimes we sit out front for a few minutes when the street gets a bit quieter in the mid-afternoon. It’s a lot of manual labor, cleaning pans and bagging up leftovers, but it’s the life we know. We’ve been at this spot for a while now and the neighbors know us by name. We just focus on getting the food out and keeping the floor swept.