Fast food street faces bumpy ride

Abdul Muttalib, right, oversees a sweet pancake dish made at his shop opposite the Minara Masjid in Mohammed Ali road in Mumbai. The pancakes, or malpua, are only made in the holy month of Ramadan.

During Ramadan, the food stalls near the Minara mosque in Mumbai do a huge trade after dark, but younger stall owners are losing interest in continuing. Foreign correspondent Richard Orange reports The moment you step off Mumbai's Mohammed Ali Road at the Minara mosque, the touts start dragging you towards their stalls. There are sizzling chicken tikkas, bubbling cauldrons of khichda lentil and mutton stew, quails milling in cages hung from the roof, stalls laid out with boiled lungs and heart, fried liver, kidneys, brain, and all manner of other rolls and sweets.

"Look, they're making so much money, they don't even have time to talk," says my translator, as Abdul Muttalib ruffles through a wad of money and his cook drops another malpua pancake into his bubbling cauldron of oil. "They don't have time to talk from 4pm to 4am." For those aiming to hold the next day's fast until the Minara Mosque's minarets ring with the call to break fast, Abdul's malpua is the thing.

The plate-sized greasy pancakes, loaded with sugar and flavoured with saffron, are only made in the holy month of Ramadan and they hold enough calories for a week. Abdul Muttalib has been running this stall at Ramadan for 30 years, and he says business has grown almost every one of those years. The area has become more wealthy, although Mohammed Ali Road does still reflect the economic troubles faced by many Muslims. But mostly it is because more and more outsiders come here to gorge themselves.

At Abdul Rehman Khan's stall opposite the mosque, there is a party of 12 well-to-do young Indians, who came here tonight because of a thread on Twitter, the social networking site. They had never met before and only two of them are Muslim. "Someone tweeted, 'Let's do Mohammed Ali Road'," said Prathima, looking a little embarrassed. "Another person tweeted it on, and now we're here." The prices reflect this change in clientele: a plate of chicken tikka at 120 Indian rupees (Dh9.10) is double or even three times what it would be in a normal roadside stall.

Ashu, who runs Azad Fast Food in one of the back streets, says he pulls in 200,000 rupees profit at Ramadan, and only between 15,000 and 40,000 rupees a month during the rest of the year. It is not only the clientele that is changing. As many of the stalls reach the third and fourth generation of owners, the families that run them are losing interest. Abdul Rehman and his brother Abdullah Nasir have one the biggest stalls. But the restaurant shut down last year to be replaced by a dress shop.

"It closed two months after last Ramadan, because we made a loss even during Ramadan," Abdul Rehman explains. This was not for a lack of customers. Both brothers are in their early 20s and studying business at a local college, so they could not supervise adequately. "The staff used to steal the food," Abdul Rehman says. It is a story played out across Mohammed Ali Road. Nagdevi Barahandi, famous over Ramadans immemorial for its 12 handis, or pots of different curries, has been replaced this year by an ice-cream stand. The children did not want to carry on their grandfather's business.

After Abdul Rehman and his brother finish their degrees, they intend to do MBAs, then a computer programming course, and then land a job at a bank. The Imdiya bakery, which the family has been running for 80 years, will be shut or sold. "We don't want to do that business, because it's a lot of headache," Abdul Rehman says. "That business isn't good, there's lots of competition, taxes are high, and the wages are now double what we were paying two years ago."

Mohammed Ali Road's most famous stall, the Bade Miyan chicken soup stall by the entrance to the mosque, is being overseen by Salman Sheikh, the grandson of the founder, and another 20-year-old student. His grandfather Mohammed Yasin, the original "Bade Miyan", or "Big Brother", arrived from north India in the 1930s, and started off a sigdi coal grill behind Mumbai's historic Taj Mahal hotel in 1938.

It is now a city institution, packing the street every weekend with families, who eat out of their parked cars. The Ramadan soup stall opened in the 1940s. Salman's degree does not necessarily mean he will leave the business. He is studying at the Institute of Hotel Management, backed by the Taj Hotel group, and will go to Mauritius next month for work experience. Kareem's, a Delhi institution, has now opened branches in Mumbai and is steadily working towards becoming a chain, and Salman is thinking about doing the same.

"Our concept at Bade Miyan's is like a drive-through restaurant: you drive in and park your car and then you move out," he says. "We could bring that concept to the Mumbai suburbs, to Delhi, Kolkata, or perhaps we could try something new, a sit-down restaurant." It sounds as if the change at Mohammed Ali Road has only just begun. [e-mail]