Get a Taste of India Through Street Snacks

Some of the best snacking in the world can be found on the streets of India, where momos, poha and bhel puri are just a few of the snacks served up on every corner. Snacks are an integral part of Indian food, and the options vary by region; each city has a specialty. Stateside, it’s easier to find Indian street snacks on the menu at places like Chicago’s Bombay Breakdown. “There’s an intense locality to street snacking in India,” says Yoshi Yamada, who runs the pop-up with Zeeshan Shah. “My friends in Mumbai will only eat vada pav (fried potato patty sandwiches) from certain stands in certain neighborhoods. There are some dishes that remain the same but have different names depending on where you are.”

Yamada and Shah create their own versions of Indian street snacks, like versions of classics such as vada pav and a Bombay sandwich, as well as beets and bhel (a riff on the bhel puri puffed-rice snack with chaat masala) and the chai-scream sandwich, which is their take on Indian biscuits. “It’s like a sugar cookie,” says Yamada. “It’s a great street snack, but it’s amazing to eat with chai.” Yamada and Shah’s version is a ginger cardamom masala chai-flavored ice cream sandwiched between the biscuits.

One snack they don’t serve is pani puri, which Yamada and Shah consider the ultimate Indian street eat. “Because of the ephemeral nature of the dish, whereby flavored water (pani) is scooped up in a bubble of chip-like bread (puri) that has potato, sprouted dal and more,” Yamada explains, “you have five seconds to eat it before the magic of the pani, the crunch of the puri, the creaminess of the potato is gone.”

Akasha Richmond turns to slightly sturdier sev puri at her Los Angeles restaurant Akasha, and for events. To make the sev (seasoned, crunchy chickpea-flour noodles), she puts a dough made from chickpea flour, water and spices through an extruder to make noodles that are fried until “they get crispy, like a Chinese chow mein noodle,” she says. The noodles are matched with California ingredients like avocado and pomegranate and served atop crispy puris. “Indian snacks can be light, salty, sweet, sour, crispy,” Richmond says. “They are a really fun little starter.”