Top 10 meals of 2015; Salt Water Cafe at #10

Choosing the ten best meals out can be rather easy for most people. Especialy, people that don't eat out often. Or people that simply don't care enough about what they eat. It does get trickier for a more demanding food soul and a body that eats out rather too often for its own good, I need add.

So, here's an indulgent look at the 10 best Mumbai restaurant meals of 2015. 

#10 - 

A planned lunch with strangers at Salt Water Cafe in Bandra was the first coming together of the food equivalent of the X-Men. The food, generally, teetered between good and great, but never hit spectacular notes. What was interesting was the shared chemistry of a bunch of disparate food lovers. When a shared love is deep and genuine, there are few barriers of age, gender, or geography (well, that is a factor in Bumbai!). People come together and stick together. They even play along with the finicky kid that won't commute.

It's nice to know that there are others like me out there. People that can take a meal very seriously. People that revere good food. SWC gave me that.

But to stop at this would be grave injustice to the purpose of portraying great meals. Salt Water Cafe gave me two genuinely wonderful dishes. 

The poha crusted prawns at SWC are wonderful. They combine a marathi boy's genetically encoded love for pohe with the sublime Mildly Spiced western style of lightly batter frying prawns. The crunch of the crisp pohe, the succulent juiciness of the prawns, lick of the mellow herbs, and the acidic kick from the liberal addition of citrus courtesy moi...they were bloody delicious.

The salmon with citrus elements and fennel was a dish out of MasterChef Oz, especially towards the Top 4 end of the competition. Truth be told, the tragedy of the dish was that I had to share it with 4-5 other people. On a more self-indulgent day, I wouldn't let anyone else touch it. It's a dish that appears pretentious but is all pure substance for the Mildly Spiced soul. Salmon and citrus were a pair meant to be together from the day they were born. This love pair is a playfully naughty one like Michelle Pfiffer's and George Clooney's in One Fine Day. It dances, it twinkles, it's frothy and light, and yet, it's substantial.

On the more 'grub' side of the affair, SWC turns out mean smallish burgers, nice risottos, and good fish mains. Go, get em tiger.