Mumbai Memories arrives at the Cathedral Square food truck market, Friday 5 Dec, 4 - 9pm.

Mobile street-food that evokes the real taste of India. Freshly prepared, delicious,100% vegetarian, authentic regional street food!

Mumbai Memories evokes the real taste of India

When Christchurch resident Purnima Khanna visits her native Mumbai, she heads straight for the street food stalls. Many of the specialities of her city are not readily available in New Zealand.

Until now that is.

Purnima with her friend Seema Sharma wants to offer her adopted city of Christchurch a real taste of India’s archetypal street food with Mumbai Memories, which is being launched at the food truck market in Cathedral Square this Friday night, 5 December.

“Offering fresh, authentic, vegetarian street food is our way of showing Christchurch some of the wonderful variety of Indian food,” she says. “I have Kiwi friends and they love our food – they just haven’t had a chance to try it before.”

Vada Pav is one dish that Purnima has particularly missed, especially when she was pregnant with her first child in New Zealand, craving a taste of home. She couldn’t find anything like the dish that is so common in Mumbai that “anyone can eat it, anytime”.

So she started making Vada Pav, or ‘Mumbai Burger’ as the team has dubbed it, herself. She says cooking this dish - potato patties dipped in chick pea flour, fried golden and laid in Pav (bun) with ginger garlic paste, served with tamarind sauce and mint and coriander sauce – is easy, but others disagree.

She learned to cook the traditional way; hanging around her mother and aunties in the kitchen as a child, volunteering to help so she could learn to make the delicious dishes too.
Now Purnima has her own children – the youngest just weeks old – but with the help of husband Sandeep and friends Seema and Hitesh Sharma, Mumbai Memories is coming to life.

Now her dishes evoke the smells and sounds of backstreets of Mumbai. “Watching Pav bhaji being made is mesmerizing. Boiled potates, vegetables, spices and dollops of butter are mashed with metal spatulas atop a massive cast iron griddle. That ‘tak a tak’ noise on the iron griddle with the spatulas, it just makes your mouth water.”

Many of the Mumbai Memories menu items are gluten free and all are vegetarian, down to the vegetarian jelly used in the dessert falooda. All are specialities of different regions. Look out for Pav Bhaji (a bun served with mashed vegetables), Parantha (wholemeal bread) stuffed with cottage cheese, potato or cauliflower, Dhokla (a Gujarati dish made with chick pea flour), Pani Puri (a round, hollow fried crisp filled with a mixture of tangy water ("pani"), with tamarind chutney, chili, chaat masala, potato, onion and chickpeas) and more.

India’s ubiquitous street food may have many origins, but a common theme is the beautifully balanced tastes and Purnima is determined to capture their original, regional flavours. Meanwhile, Bollywood music and décor will instantly bring Mumbai, a chaotic and vibrant city formerly known as Bombay and home to the Bollywood film industry, to mind.

The Mumbai Memories food truck will operate evenings and weekends and will advise customers of its location via a Facebook page www.facebook.com/mumbaimemoriesnz.

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