There is a particular quality of light in an Irani café at about four in the afternoon. It comes in through tall doors on two sides, because the café is almost always on a corner, and lands on marble tabletops worn smooth by a century of elbows. A ceiling fan turns without urgency. Someone at the next table is reading a newspaper he appears to have been reading since the morning. You order chai and bun maska, and the city outside becomes slightly less loud.
I have been going to Irani cafés for as long as I have lived in Mumbai, and I still cannot fully explain why they matter so much to people who do not otherwise share very much. Office clerks, college students, retired Parsi gentlemen, film people, tourists with guidebooks and taxi drivers on a break all sit at the same kind of table. Perhaps that is the explanation.
Who the Iranis were
The Irani cafés were founded by Zoroastrian migrants from Iran, largely from the provinces of Yazd and Kerman, who came to Bombay from the nineteenth century onwards and in larger numbers in the early twentieth. They are distinct from the Parsis, who share the Zoroastrian faith but whose ancestors arrived on the Gujarat coast many centuries earlier. The newer arrivals, often leaving poverty and religious pressure behind, found that the growing city needed places to eat and drink cheaply at all hours, and they set about providing them.
The popular story, which I repeat because everyone does and it may well be true, is that the Iranis bought corner plots that others avoided as inauspicious, which is why so many cafés have entrances on two streets. Whatever the reason, the corner location made them landmarks. For a long time, directions in parts of the city were given by reference to the Irani on the corner.
What to order
The core menu is short and hardly changes. Bun maska is a soft, slightly sweet bun split and loaded with butter; brun maska is its crustier cousin, made with a harder-crusted bread, and is the one to dunk. Both go with Irani chai, which is milky, sweet and strong, and comes in a cup that is not quite big enough, so you order another.
Beyond that, most cafés offer some combination of egg dishes, especially akuri, the soft, spiced Parsi-style scrambled eggs; mutton or chicken dishes; kheema pav; caramel custard; and biscuits from the glass jars on the counter, such as nankhatai and the crumbly, cumin-flecked khari. Raspberry soda, in a particularly bright shade of pink, is the traditional companion to a heavier meal.
And then there is berry pulao, the dish most associated with Britannia & Co. at Ballard Estate: rice cooked with meat and topped with the small, tart barberries that recall the family's Iranian origins. It is one of the few dishes in the city I would describe as worth planning a day around.
The rules on the wall
Many Irani cafés are known for their signboards of house rules, a list of prohibitions posted near the counter. The classic versions forbid such things as combing your hair, talking loudly, lingering too long, asking for credit, and discussing horse-racing. Some cafés have kept the boards as a matter of pride; elsewhere they survive mostly on postcards and fridge magnets. They are funny now, but they were also practical instructions for running a small, busy place with low prices and a lot of customers who might otherwise stay all afternoon over one cup.
The rules are part of the charm, but they point to something real. These are working businesses, often run by the same family for generations, on thin margins in some of the most expensive real estate in the country.
Why so few remain
By most accounts there were once several hundred Irani cafés in the city. Today there are far fewer, a few dozen at most by the usual estimates, and the number keeps shrinking. The reasons are not mysterious. Many operated in rented premises under old tenancy arrangements, and when buildings are redeveloped the café rarely returns. The next generation of owning families has often chosen other careers, and running a café from early morning to late evening, every day, is hard work. The very low prices that made them beloved are difficult to sustain against modern rents, wages and ingredient costs. Some have converted into bars, bakeries or restaurants; many have simply closed.
Those that survive tend to do so through a combination of family stubbornness, owned premises, and a loyal crowd. Kyani & Co. near Dhobi Talao, one of the oldest, is still pouring chai. Britannia & Co. still serves its berry pulao at Ballard Estate. Yazdani Bakery in Fort still turns out its bread and brun maska from its bakery. There are others across the city, in Grant Road, Dadar and beyond, and part of the pleasure is stumbling on one you did not know about.
How to visit well
Because the survivors are now part of the city's tourist circuit, a little courtesy goes a long way. A few suggestions from years of sitting at marble tables:
- Eat and drink. It sounds obvious, but these are cafés, not museums. Order properly, and order again if you stay.
- Do not linger over an empty cup at a busy lunch hour. The rule on the wall exists for a reason.
- Ask before photographing people, and be discreet with the camera in general. The regulars are not props.
- Check before you go. Opening days and hours vary, some places close on particular days of the week, and a few keep hours that suit their regulars rather than visitors.
- Pay attention to the older staff. They have usually been there far longer than any of the recommendations you read online, and will tell you what is good today.
Why we keep going back
The honest reason I keep returning is not nostalgia, although there is some of that. It is that the Irani café offers something the rest of the city struggles to provide: an unhurried, public place where nobody is trying to sell you anything more than a cup of tea and a buttered bun. You can sit alone without feeling alone. You can meet an old friend without it being an occasion.
Mumbai is not sentimental about its buildings, and it will not be sentimental about these either. Each one that survives does so because people keep walking through the door. So go, order the chai, and have a second bun maska. It is the least sentimental form of preservation there is, and probably the most effective.
