Families in Food: Flavours of the Pind

The restaurant was started by Kasturi Lal Wadhwa, who moved to Delhi in 1948, at the age of 20, from Rawalpindi (now in Pakistan). With five younger siblings and a newly-wed wife to look after, he thought of selling the famed Pindi channa bhatura, the special Rawalpindi style of chickpea curry and fried bread, as his best bet. Kasturi Lal worked from 5 am till midnight, rolling over a hundred bhaturas and making a drum full of channa, selling them on a push cart near India Gate. One plate then sold for an aana or two.

A decade later, he was allotted a commercial space in Pandara Road, in a drive to rehabilitate refugees, where the restaurant stands now. With only a vegetable and grocery store in the square, Pindi was one of the first food shops to operate in the area in 1959. “When he shifted here, it was a struggle initially because the customers did not move for they couldn’t be informed that the shop had shifted. Eventually it picked up, as IAS officers and aspirants frequented the shop,” says Kasturi Lal’s grandson Anuj Wadhwa, 36, the third-generation co-owner of the shop, who runs it with his father Yashpal, 68, uncle Vinod, 58, and cousin Pulkit, 30.

The menu was expanded to include butter chicken, tandoori roti and dal makhani. “At that time, we were one of the very few restaurants serving Mughlai dishes like mutton tikka masala, seekh kebab masala, brain curry, or mutton burra — what we call Frontier cuisine. In the ’70s, people would go all the way to Karim’s in Chandni Chowk but soon realised they could get it here as well,” says Wadhwa. Eventually, with growing demand, paneer dishes and Chinese cuisine were added to the menu. “We’ve now added soya dishes, too, and they are doing well,” he says, “But customers have been coming in, for over 40 years for the brain curry, mutton and dal makhani.”

Anuj Wadhwa, outside the restaurant.

Back in the day, Pindi was a small shop with the kitchen inside and charpoys set up outside for customers to sit. Families used to dine in their cars, parked outside the shop. Till 1991, the restaurant could host only 10 people. Two sections were added later to accommodate about 100. Refurbished three years ago, the dhaba now has a modern decor.

“Old customers tell me that when they were students, my grandfather used to give roti free with dal or extra gravy with butter chicken,” says Wadhwa, who used to accompany Kasturi Lal to the Kalkaji mandi to buy vegetables and meat. “He used to wear a white kurta pajama, and the moment he walked in, the vendors would ask ‘Kitna (how much)’? He would raise six fingers indicating 60 kg or 10 for 100 kg,” he recounts. The patriarch came to the shop almost every day till he died in 2009.

Kasturi Lal made all the masalas — chana masala, chat masala, garam masala himself. “I used to keep asking him how to do it because there was never a definite proportion. It was also about his mood. He used to mix one fistful of this or two of that, according to his whims. I asked him to teach me the proportions because it would have become impossible for us to replicate it afterwards. He gave me a rough estimate and we have managed to replicate 80 per cent of that taste of the pindi channa,” he says.

Over the years, patrons have included actors late Shashi Kapoor, Arjun Kapoor, director Imtiaz Ali, Congress party president Rahul Gandhi, cricketer Mohammad Azharuddin and Ajay Jadeja, among others. “Amitabh Bachchan always orders butter chicken from us whenever he is in Delhi,” he says.

With franchises in Ghaziabad and Jaipur, they are now also into wedding catering. But at Pandara Road, they are thinking of experimenting with the menu and presentation, and hosting kebab and biryani festivals.