The Old Yazdani Bakery, Mumbai

This is not a place many of you snobs would approve of.

It’s a little dusty, with wan furniture and interiors that have seen better days. Bread and pastries are transferred from trays to plates with bare hands. Plastic crockery bears the marks of wear. Customers sit in old-school booths beneath tungsten lights. Bakelite switches. Exhaust fans. From the outside, it looks like just another tattered shop cowering along a narrow street in Mumbai — one that hardly meets your expectations of food hygiene.

But frankly, I don’t give two doughnuts about that.

In such divisive times, it is tempting to retreat into the familiar — to be surrounded by people who look like us and do what we do.

But this is India.

In Mumbai specifically — where the world’s most expensive 27-storey home (for a family of five… shame on you, Mukesh Ambani) overlooks one of the largest slums in Asia — I suggest you step down from your bejewelled elephant, exchange your pound sterling for empathy rupees, and rub shoulders with the Bombay wallahs.

This is Yazdani Bakery — an old, charming Irani establishment that has stood tall in Mumbai’s Fort area since the decade after the Second World War. Everything in the shop is handmade, and they charge no service tax.

We went there for breakfast on a Thursday morning. It wasn’t very busy, and we already knew what we wanted.

Brun maska, baby.

This Irani bread — soft as a cloud, dotted with raisins, and generously slathered with Amul butter. And chai.

Also bread pudding. And mawa cakes. And egg puffs.

And note to self: join Over-Ordering Anonymous. Or better yet, start one.

Still… gutted we didn’t get our hands on the multi-grain loaf, apple pie and khari biscuits.

We lingered long enough to observe everyone who ate there that morning — foreigners, annoying foreigners who couldn’t stop taking pictures, locals, couples, regulars — but not long enough to stomach everything on the menu.

The brun maska was great, but if there’s anything that warrants a Dumbo ride back to Yazdani Bakery, it’s the bread pudding.

Funny — as I come to the end of this post, it strikes me that my trip to India was somewhat, if not entirely, sanctimonious. A little hypocritical, even. Here I am, preaching empathy; defending my decision to travel to Mumbai to friends who ridiculed it; extolling a decades-old, family-run shop with walls yellowed by time… while, throughout my trip, I was marvelling at buffaloes on the street, taking photographs of saree-clad women with bedraggled hair and baskets on their heads, as though they were scenes out of National Geographic Traveller.

I clung to my return ticket to London like a proper, self-indulgent holidaymaker. A zoo visitor. Shame.

It was easy — because none of these problems are mine. And perhaps it’s true that there is a darker side to human nature: that we feel better about ourselves when we see others suffer misfortune. So when I felt discontented with my life in London, I “escaped” to Mumbai — to feel more grateful for my soy smoothie bowls, my Friday nights, my wonderful job, and my twenty pairs of shoes.

All right. This is getting dangerously deep and philosophical.

Let’s get out of here.

With love,
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