Pune Food Trail

Pune's food lives in the peths, the old walled-city wards around Shaniwar Wada, and it does not travel across town. Koregaon Park and Baner are a perfectly good restaurant city with almost none of this cooking on the menu. Build the eating around Bajirao Road and Tulshibaug, and treat the rest of Pune as where you sleep. Misal is the dish to understand first. The word is Marathi for mixture, and it is meant literally: matki usal, which is sprouted moth beans, with farsan and raw onion over the top and the tarri poured on. Tarri is the spiced gravy, called kat or sample on most boards here, and it comes in colours — laal, kala, hirwa — according to what went into it. Around that sit three things worth building a morning around. Sabudana khichdi is sago, potato and coarsely crushed peanut, and it began as fasting food. Bakarwadi is a besan spiral fried tight around coconut and sesame. Mastani is a milkshake with ice cream dropped into it, and it wants a spoon. One expectation is worth resetting before you order. Puneri misal is generally reckoned the gentler one — Kolhapur's is the heat people have read about — and Pune leans on goda masala and coconut where Kolhapur leans on chilli. Do not take that as a rule. The same shop in Tulshibaug is recommended in one Pune misal survey as the place to go for a mildly spiced plate and headlined in another as the spiciest in town, and the survey calling it mild hands that title to Kata Kirr instead. Go in without a fixed idea of how hot Puneri misal is. The shop decides that here, not the city.

Two clusters, and they are not one errand. The Maharashtrian half — misal, sabudana, Chitale's counter, Sujata's — sits inside a short walk of Bajirao Road and Tulshibaug, and the peths are flat and dense enough to do entirely on foot. The Irani half is over in Camp: Kayani on East Street, and the cafes around it. Split the two across separate outings or you will spend the day in an auto instead of at a table. Eat misal early in the day. Not because the city has a rule about it, but because the places worth going to can shut once the pot has gone — Shri Krishna Bhuvan is written up as closing early on days it runs out of stock, and Kayani's Shrewsbury biscuits are hand-made and habitually sold out. Kayani has no second branch anywhere in India, so there is no other address to fall back on. The tarri comes in its own bowl. Add it a spoon at a time and taste in between; the kitchen's default is calibrated for people who eat this every week, and you cannot take it back out. Bakarwadi and chivda are a box you carry out, not a stop you stand at. Chitale has counters across the city, Deccan included, so buy on the way out rather than at the start. Tulshibaug itself is a shopping market before it is a food street — bangles, steel vessels, puja goods — with a Ram temple in the middle of it that took from 1763 to 1795 to build. The eating is tucked into the bylanes off it rather than sitting on the frontage, so allow for a wrong turn or two.

Pune cooks the way it does partly because of how it was zoned. The old city is laid out as peths, up to seventeen wards put down mostly under Maratha and Peshwa rule between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, though Kasba Peth, the oldest, goes back to around 1300. Seven of them carry the name of a weekday — Somwar, Mangalwar, Budhwar and the rest — because trade in that ward ran on that day. The others are named for people and for gods: Sadashiv Peth was laid out in 1769 and Narayan Peth in 1761, both after Peshwa family names. Baji Rao I laid Shaniwar Wada's foundation on 10 January 1730 and the fort stayed the Peshwas' seat until 1818. The households filling the wards around it cooked largely vegetarian, on groundnut, coconut, jaggery and goda masala — goda means sweet in Marathi and refers to the smell rather than the taste, which comes off dagad phool, a lichen that turns smoky the moment it hits hot oil. Misal is the clearest case of household food climbing onto a counter. A sprouted-bean usal was a way of stretching a meal. It met pav, which the Portuguese brought to Goa — the word is their pão, and Goan cooks raised the dough with palm toddy because yeast was hard to come by — and the pair became a dish with a name of its own. Sabudana khichdi arrived from the other direction, off the fasting calendar: upvas days ruled out grain, so sago, potato and groundnut filled the gap and rock salt replaced the ordinary kind. Pune still eats it on Ashadhi Ekadashi, the day in the month of Ashadha when the palkhis of Dnyaneshwar and Tukaram reach Pandharpur. Both set out from villages on this city's edge and come through the wards on the way — Tukaram's leaves Dehu and is in Nana Peth by its third day. The shops are younger than the food. Chitale Bandhu took a five-hundred-square-foot place on Bajirao Road in 1950 and did not put bakarwadi on the counter until the 1970s, which means the snack that stands for Pune everywhere else in India is younger than most of the people eating it. Sujata opened as an ice-cream shop in 1967. Shri Krishna Bhuvan in Tulshibaug, from 1941, is the oldest of the Maharashtrian names on this trail.