Hotel Malvani

Hotel Malvani is our small place in Pimple Gurav where we focus on the food from the Konkan coast. We aren't really a hotel where you stay the night, even though the name says hotel. In this part of Maharashtra, people often call small restaurants hotels. We’ve been here for a few years now, right in the heart of Pimple Gurav. The kitchen is small and we use a lot of coconut and fish, so the smell is very strong, which we like. It’s mostly family members working here. My mother helps with the spices because she knows the traditional ways better than any of us. We have a few wooden tables and the walls have some old pictures on them. It’s not a place for a fancy date, but it’s good for a solid lunch. We get a lot of workers and people living nearby who don’t want to cook at home. The floors are stone and they get scrubbed every night after we close. Sometimes we run out of the special fish early in the day because the market didn't have much good stock. We just tell people honestly that it's finished for the day. We don’t try to be something we aren't. We’re just a local eatery trying to serve the kind of food we grew up eating. It’s a lot of hard work and late nights, but it keeps us busy.