How long does it take to fry onions and tomato for the base of a dish? For Chef Hussain Shahzad, around 45 minutes. In the kadhai goes ghee, fortified with kewra water and rosewater. Once it stops sputtering, chopped onions go in, caramelised slowly until golden brown.
“It used to be a bar, a bachelor pad,” he says. It didn’t even have a mirror until a month ago. It’s also where half the city’s most sought-after chefs land up, after a busy Saturday night; his bond with Varun Totlani of Masque is particularly warm. “It’s hard to come by, because we all work such tough years,” he says, stirring onions.
Today, though, isn’t about the restaurant. He is making his mother’s masoor pulao — a dish he ate once a week growing up in a Bohri household in Chennai, on days the family didn’t eat meat. “Aloo was the default meat option. Mum would put fried aloo in to entice us.” He wrote the recipe down only a few years ago, putting it on The Bombay Canteen’s monsoon menu in 2023, topped with crispy fried potatoes to relive his nostalgia. It returned to the menu again in 2025.
The recipe came from his paternal grandmother, passed to his mother, who made it her own.
“This is a very Bombay-style version,” he says, adding overnight-soaked dal to a pressure cooker for two whistles. It’s built in two parts: the dal, cooked almost dry, holding its shape but turning “moussey” when pressed between the palms; and the rice, layered on top. Potatoes, soy chunks, boiled eggs or meat can go in — but in tribute to the original, he leaves it as it always was.
This passion led him to culinary school in Manipal, a stint with the Oberoi Group, then Eleven Madison Park in New York, where watching chefs embrace their own heritage made him question why he hadn’t embraced his. There, he met the late Chef Floyd Cardoz, co-founder and culinary director of Hunger Inc, and felt he had found someone doing something genuinely relevant with Indian food. Hussain moved to Mumbai in 2015 as a sous chef at The Bombay Canteen, unsure Indian cooking was even his lane. By the second or third menu, he knew this was it.
Eleven years on, he is executive chef across the group — The Bombay Canteen, O Pedro, Veronica’s and Papa’s. In 2023, the former Jude Bakery space came up — Veronica’s below, Papa’s in the attic above. “My first thought was we can’t even have a loo! But we decided to do a counter. I said it’ll be a performance, a theatre,” an idea he calls a collaboration of dreams shared with co-founders Sameer Seth and Yash Bhanage.
Papa’s, by his own admission, was the menu that broke him the hardest — eight months to develop, the canvas completely blank. Today, it presents an elevated and adventurous take on comforting forms and flavours, putting a culture-defying stamp on Indian cuisine and dining traditions.
Back at the stove, he layers the pulao: smoked masoor dal at the base of a heavy-bottomed pan, mint and coriander leaves scattered over, then rice, finished with a generous pour of ghee. The lid goes on tight, and it sits on dum for 10-15 minutes. When he finally spoons it into a large bowl, there’s something unmistakably boyish on his face — the same kid once copying recipes off the television screen, now running the most talked-about kitchen in the country, still finding joy in the one dish that never left.
2½ cups dried masoor dal, ¼ cup ghee, ½ tsp coriander powder, ½ tsp red chilli powder, ½ tsp turmeric powder and water as needed
Heat ghee. Add powdered spices. Cook for 30 seconds. Add dal and water. Cook until just tender. Strain. Save the stock.
Ingredients: 2 onions (thinly sliced), 1 tomato (sliced), 1½ tbsp garlic paste, 2 tsp ginger paste, 2 tsp green chilli paste, ½ cup ghee, ½ tsp turmeric powder, 1 tsp Kashmiri red chilli powder, 1 tsp coriander powder, ½ tsp cumin powder, ½ tsp garam masala, 1 tsp rose water, 1 tsp kewra water.
Heat ghee. Add rose water and kewra water. Add onions, cook slowly until caramelised. Add garlic, ginger and green chilli paste; cook until the raw smell disappears.
Cook the spices for 1–2 minutes. Add tomato. Cook until broken down into a thick masala. Add the cooked dal.
Ingredients: 2½ cups basmati rice, ¼ cup ghee, 1 onion (thinly sliced), 10-12 green cardamom pods, 2 green chillies (slit), 2-3 cloves, 1 tbsp chopped garlic, 1 tbsp chopped ginger, 5 cups reserved dal stock, chopped coriander and mint, salt to taste.
Heat ghee in a heavy pot. Add cardamom and cloves; cook until fragrant. Add garlic, ginger and green chillies; saute for 1 minute. Add onion and cook until golden. Add dal stock and bring to a boil. Add rice and salt. Cook until 90% done; drain excess liquid.
Spread the dal in a heavy-bottomed pot. Layer the rice over it. Drizzle with 1 tbsp ghee, cook on dum for 10–15 minutes. Rest for 5 minutes, then gently fluff. Garnish with mint and coriander and serve.
Heena Khandelwal is a Special Correspondent with The Indian Express, Mumbai. She covers a wide range... Read More
