114 Indian barflies helped curate this Mumbai bar’s menu

For a teetotaller, Niyati Rao has a curiously high degree of interest in alcohol. “I’ve always been a taster, I taste everything,” says the Mumbai-based chef, best known for her ingredient-forward restaurant Ekaa. “I like to learn about new drinks, but if I’m being honest, it’s the food part that goes with the drinks that really excites me.” So it’s surprising when she shares, “I’d always wanted to open a bar.”

In fact, I am with the Noma Copenhagen alum at her newly opened bar, Bombay Daak, in Mumbai’s Bandra suburb, on a particularly rainy August evening. “I have friends from Spain who really pride themselves on their tapas and wine culture; others from Italy who would say their antipasti is the best. I had an epiphany; I realised that we too have daru-chakna as an integral part of our lives. It felt like I was sitting on a treasure trove that nobody was doing anything with.”

And so, Rao and her partner (in life and business) Sagar Neve decided to dig deeper to fully comprehend the scale and diversity of the daru-chakna culture in India. They scoured existing literature—books such as The Indian Spirit by Magandeep Singh and the bibliography of colonial-era food scientist and writer KT Achaya—and clicked through online forums and web pages, to no avail. “While there’s a lot of documentation of Indian food in all its varied forms, not much has been written about Indian-made alcohol—which is odd because, as we realised, it has been famous for centuries in all forms,” observes Neve. “Even somras [the Vedic era drink that is supposed to have medicinal properties] has held such an important place in our culture, but now only about half the recipe exists so no one knows how to make it.” 

Not ready to give up yet, Rao and Neve went on a dive bar crawl of epic proportions over the last year—visiting locally-famous country liquor distilleries and interviewing people from across the country about their pegs-and-nibbles rituals. In Gujarat’s Kathiawad district, distillers showed them the exact, complex technique of how they brewed hooch from fruit. In Punjab, they noticed the addition of dry fruits to a brew that would be fermented for weeks and which people would accompany with platefuls of a dal-dahi mix. In Nagaland’s Mokokchung village, noushi (fermented yam paste) gave company to glasses of zutho (fermented rice liquor). In Kerala, they saw people drinking tadi while licking achar (an act commonly called ‘touchings’) by the fingerful to enhance the taste of the fermented coconut sap.

The Bihar-born watchman who patrols their residential building in Mumbai told Rao about craving litti chokha—smoky dough balls stuffed with spices, served with an eggplant mash—after a few drinks. Rao’s stepfather in Kolkata told her stories of inhaling plates of wontons with beer at 3am in Tangra, Chinatown after long nights at the Gymkhana. Ram Mohan from Kerala told her about drinking Old Monk with Goldspot, the orange fizzy drink, like a true ’70s kid; and combining that with bowls of cut tapioca dressed in lemon juice. In Rajasthan, Pawan Chaudhary told them about the achar made from rabbits, which his family would savour along with glasses of the musky, saffrony heritage drink Kesar Kasturi on cold winter evenings. 

It is from this deep dive into these oral histories—as well as taking a leaf out of the playbook of the Barcelona-based Adrià brothers, who ran now shuttered Michelin-starred tapas bar, Tickets—that Rao and Neve hooked on to their idea for an “elevated dive bar” that both paid homage to an integral part of Indian culture while prioritising comfort and food safety.

At Bombay Daak’s entrance hangs a ‘donor’s board’, upon which are chalked up the names of a dozen of the 114 people they interviewed before crafting their menu. Inside, it feels like time and space have collapsed. From the ceiling hang 110-year-old lamps sourced from Chor Bazaar. The walls are adorned with hand-painted tiles by Pune-based ceramist Shibani Dhavalikar that speak to the botanicals used in country liquor, as well as the famous fish after which the bar is named. The glassware is ribbed, the plates are steel, the bill boxes are aluminium. The music is an eclectic mix of ’80s disco-inspired Bollywood, Ilaiyaraja hits, and 21st century indie wonders like The Ska Vengers and The F16s—a playlist that entire generations can groove to. 

And then there’s the menu, full of food and drinks “done our way”, featuring ingredients sourced from the places they visited, and recipes inspired by the stories they heard. A dish called ‘chivda kapse’ combines a rare recipe for rasam, passed on by a colleague’s 98-year-old grandmother, with Rao’s mother’s quick fix for last-minute chakna—succulent chicken pieces reduced in leftover rasam—served on a plate of sweet-and-savoury fried chivda, in the style of the iconic ‘Virar bhurji’. 

‘Pork and smoke’ mixes black pork sourced from Meghalaya—pigs fattened on apples—with potato mash and peppers. In ‘Wai Wai’, she enhances the North East’s go-to drink time pairing with white peas and a pickle made from 15 ingredients. Then there are bigger, starchier portions to absorb the alcohol, and desserts from the heartland that could act as rocket fuel to your buzzing high.  

The bar menu, curated by head mixologist Yathish Bangera, features a section called ‘Swadeshi Sips’, featuring four cocktails inspired by country liquor such as Coorg’s bird's eye chilli wine and ‘Santra’ from Maharashtra; their version has vodka and Nagpur orange combo served in “desi daru” bottles.

In all this diversity, Rao finds one unifying factor: “A good mix of salt, fat, acid and heat”. These dishes and drinks are “divided by texture, which is sukha-geela; and temperature, which is garam-thanda,” she says.

All in all, Bombay Daak’s menu is a welcome addition to the country’s increasingly inventive nightlife, poised on the axis nostalgia and that fascination with the hyper-local that spikes our Instagram explore pages. And the Indian tippler can’t get enough—just look at the kids jostling in line for a kokum-urrak in Goa’s Chapora district, or the hordes making a beeline for that open riverside bar in Kochi to guzzle fresh toddy with plates of spicy beef fry. “It is so much more complex than any other eating-drinking culture in the world,” adds Rao. “It is like a universe unto itself.”

Meal for two: ₹1,200

Timings: 6 pm–1:30 am; open all days

Address: Bombay Daak, Shop No - 5 / 21, ONGC Complex, HIG Colony, Nityanand Nagar, Reclamation, Bandra West, Mumbai