THEDRUNKENMUNKEY
A little Old Bombay on 92nd Street
family recipes, four generations on
Two friends, one table
The Drunken Munkey began with two childhood friends. Arun Mirchandani and Chirag Chaman grew up in Army families, where some of the best meals were the ones served in the mess hall — generous, unfussy, made to feed everyone at the table.
Arun came to it trained: a graduate of the Welcomgroup Graduate School of Hotel Administration in Manipal, the hotel school that produced Michelin-starred chef Vikas Khanna, then years in restaurants, bars and hotels. He had lived on the Upper East Side since 2003 and wanted a cocktail bar of his own up here. He opened The Drunken Munkey on East 92nd Street in 2013, the first room in the neighborhood to make the cocktail the point rather than a short list printed beside the food.
Underneath the bistro is a tribute to the Irani cafés of old Bombay: Leopold, Britannia, Yazdani, Empire. It is the neighborhood spot Arun had always wanted, in his own backyard.
Recipes carried across a partition, kept across generations.
Ask which version of an Indian dish is the correct one and there is no answer worth having. These recipes grew up in houses, one kitchen at a time, each with its own hand on the spices, so the same chicken curry can taste different two doors apart and neither cook is wrong. What is left is heritage: family recipes, kept and handed on.
Most of them came from Arun's grandmother, Savitri Mirchandani, who was Dadima at home. She left Karachi by ship in 1947 with a suitcase, two small children and a heavy brass hamam dasta that one of her maids had hidden in the luggage. Mum's Lemon Daal is her recipe folded together with Arun's mother's. The First-Class Railway Chicken is her chicken curry. The chilli cheese toast he learned from her. She was here on the first night in 2013 with her prayer book, she turned a hundred in this room in September 2022, and she died in March 2026, at 103.
The long version of her story runs in the Munkey Times: The Recipes My Grandmother Carried.
Many of the vegetarian dishes come from Arun's mother, Vasanti, who is South Indian and picked up a great many of Dadima's recipes herself. She lives close by and still spot-checks the kitchen, thirteen years in. This is home-style cooking, served in a proper bistro setting.
“It really comes down to heritage. Family recipes, passed down through generations. From my great-grandmother to my grandmother to my mother, now to me.”
Arun Mirchandani · Founder
Behind the bar
The cocktail, tracing home
Arun is the soul of the Munkey — a collector of the craft, from vintage bar tools to the stories behind a drink. He built the bar around a simple idea: that the cocktail itself traces back to India.
Punch turns up in English in 1632, in a letter written from India, and it turns up with five parts: alcohol, sugar, lemon, water, spice. Paanch is Hindi for five. The bowl had been going round the table for the better part of two centuries before English produced the word cocktail.
The House Paanch has been on the list since the first night. Lupe Toxtli, who runs the bar, builds it on a spiced syrup made here, with fresh fruit and a combination of spirits and liqueurs he has no intention of writing down. It comes by the glass, or by the bowl for a table that wants to share one.
Everyone eats
That mess-hall spirit runs through everything, right down to the Munkey Meal — a hot meal served nightly to anyone in need, which our guests keep going by sponsoring a plate for just $7.