Paani Puri

Semolina puffs, chickpea-potato chaat — tamarind-mint or spiced yogurt

There is a correct way to eat paani puri, and it is worth knowing before the plate lands, because you get about four seconds.

The puri is a hollow semolina shell, fried until it puffs into a sphere. It arrives with a chickpea-and-potato filling and the paani itself — tamarind-mint water, cold and sharp and faintly alarming the first time. You crack a hole in the top of the shell with a thumb, spoon the filling in, fill it with the water, and put the whole thing in your mouth in one go.

Not two goes. One. A puri bitten in half collapses and empties into your hand, and every vendor from Bombay to Delhi has watched somebody learn that the hard way.

A good vendor works like a production line with a queue attached — crack, fill, dip, hand over — and you eat while he is already building the next one. Nobody stops to talk. The plate in front of you is a countdown rather than a course.

It is street food in the proper sense: eaten standing up, made one at a time by someone who has made a hundred thousand of them, and gone before you have finished deciding what it tasted like. Bombay calls it paani puri. Delhi calls it golgappa. Calcutta calls it puchka. The argument over which name is correct has never been settled and never will be.

The water is where vendors compete. Some lean on mint, some on tamarind, some add a jaljeera bite of black salt and cumin that catches the back of the throat on the way down.

Order it early in the meal. It is the one plate on the table that will not wait for anybody, and a puri left standing for two minutes is a soggy puri and a wasted one.

Ours comes with the tamarind-mint water, or with spiced yogurt instead — at which point it is dahi puri, and a slower, gentler business altogether.

“…the pani puri appetizer, which was creamy and complex”

Dietary & spice

The tamarind-mint version is vegan as it comes. The dahi puri is not, because of the yogurt. Both carry gluten in the shell. Vegetarian dishes are marked (v) on the menu, and the allergy menu lists what every dish carries.

Paani Puri.