Eating street food is like taking a bite into a city’s culture and in each bite tasting its history, geography, and politics. Nowhere is this truer than it is in India and the subcontinent.
In enthucutlet’s Let’s Chaat… About Street Food season we’re sharing stories that our street food is trying to tell us if we listen closely enough. For the next three months, our enthuOriginals, guides, newsletters, and reels will shine a light on the anticipation, delight, and humour that is inherent in eating on the streets of India and beyond.
India’s thelas, chaat centres, bhelwalas, sandwich points, kulfiwalas, dosa carts, etc. offer us not only raste ka khana, they also help us get to know their neighbourhoods and communities.
This holds true whether we’re in our hometown, or whether we’re in a brand new location, curiously and greedily watching the locals huddle for kebabs or kachoris. Let’s Chaat… is about India’s and Indians’ love for street food, and it is also about the communities that provide it. Through it, we’ll try to understand what qualifies as street food and why.
Street food speaks a crazy creole as it travels across the country. Eating on the street is fun and entertaining, and it is also as rich in narrative, as it is in flavour.
In Let’s Chaat… we examine how avocado toast has become a street food phenomenon from Surat to Bengaluru. We talk about the briny, tangy nostalgia of ice orathi on Calicut Beach. We sample ‘regional’ iterations of Chinese food in Mumbai, Dehradun, and Ajmer. We’ll also step outside the country, and explore how desi-origin Gen Z-ers are making Indian street food their own, well beyond our borders.
India eats on the street every day. Our enthuGuides will take you on a street food tour: chai addas in Kolkata, biryani in Bangladesh, bois and chois in Udvada, and meaty food trucks and carts in Salcete.
Let’s Chaat… is loaded with chatpata, sizzling, fun, and unusual stories about how India eats on the go, under the sky, gleefully. Street food in this country is always a treat.