Sindhi Food in Mumbai: Dal Pakwan, Sai Bhaji & Koki

TL;DR: Mumbai’s best Sindhi food lives in Chembur — the community’s post-Partition heartland — where old-guard breakfast joints like VIG Refreshments serve crisp, morning-fresh dal pakwan. Come early for pakwan and koki, sit down for sai bhaji, Sindhi kadhi-chawal and tuk, and don’t skip Sion’s Guru Kripa samosas or a trip to Ulhasnagar if you want the food at its most unfiltered.

Sindhi cooking is one of the great quiet cuisines of Mumbai — beloved, distinctive, and almost invisible unless you know where to look. It clusters, mostly around the neighbourhoods where Sindhi families rebuilt their lives after 1947, and it peaks in the early morning, when the pakwan is fresh and the dal is just off the flame. This is a guide to finding it.

A cuisine shaped by Partition

To understand Sindhi food in Mumbai, you have to understand how it got here. When the subcontinent was partitioned in 1947, Hindu Sindhis left the province of Sindh — now in Pakistan — with almost nothing, and many were settled in refugee colonies around Mumbai. Chembur became one of the first major resettlement areas, and its Sindhi Colony and “Sindhi Society” pockets still carry the community’s imprint today.

Food became a way of holding on to a homeland that no longer existed on the map. Dishes like dal pakwan, koki and Sindhi kadhi travelled across the border in memory and were recreated, generation after generation, in Bombay kitchens. That’s why the best Sindhi food here still feels homely rather than fancy — it was never restaurant food to begin with.

What Sindhi food actually is

If you only know Sindhi cooking by name, here are the dishes worth learning by heart:

• Dal pakwan — the signature Sindhi breakfast. Slow-cooked chana dal, tempered and spiced, served with pakwan: crisp, cracker-flat deep-fried maida discs seasoned with ajwain and pepper. You break the pakwan into the dal, add tangy tamarind and green chutney, and eat it with raw onion. Rich, savoury, addictive.
• Sai bhaji — a wholesome one-pot dish of spinach and other greens simmered with chana dal and vegetables. Nutritious, mildly spiced, and usually eaten with bugga chawal (a brown, caramelised rice). This is everyday Sindhi home cooking at its best.
• Koki — a thick, hearty flatbread kneaded with onion, green chilli and spices, griddled slowly until crisp at the edges. A breakfast and tea-time staple, wonderful with curd or a cup of chai.
• Sindhi kadhi — nothing like the yoghurt kadhi of the north. This is a tangy, tomato-and-tamarind curry built on roasted gram flour (besan) and loaded with vegetables like drumstick, cluster beans, okra and potato. Eaten with rice — kadhi-chawal — it’s the Sunday lunch a lot of Sindhis grew up on.
• Tuk — twice-fried potato (aloo tuk) or arbi (colocasia), smashed and crisped, dusted with spice. The classic side to kadhi-chawal.
• Seyal — a moist, onion-tomato style of cooking applied to bread (seyal mani) or leftovers, and much-loved.

For a sweet finish, look for Sindhi-style sweets and mithai at the community’s older sweet shops — a good pairing with our Mumbai mithai and desserts guide.

Chembur: the Sindhi food heartland

If you visit one neighbourhood for Sindhi food, make it Chembur. Decades of Sindhi settlement have left it dotted with small, family-run breakfast joints and sweet shops that have been doing the same few things brilliantly for generations. This is where dal pakwan is a morning institution, not a novelty.

VIG Refreshments (Chembur East)

The name most people will point you to. A long-running, no-frills Sindhi breakfast institution in Chembur East, now run by a later generation of the founding family, VIG is famous for its dal pakwan, pattice-chola, samosa-chola and thick, dhaba-style lassi. It’s an early-morning place — get there in the first half of the day for pakwan at its crispest. Expect breakfast-joint prices, roughly ₹100–250 a head; treat that as a rough band, not a fixed figure.

Jhama Sweets (Chembur)

A well-known Sindhi sweet shop and snack counter in Chembur with a following across the city. Alongside its mithai, it’s a reliable stop for Sindhi snacks like pattice and dal pakwan. Good for a sit-down bite or to carry sweets home.

Sion, Thane and the wider suburbs

Chembur isn’t the only address. Sion is home to Guru Kripa, a decades-old eatery that’s a genuine Mumbai legend — mobbed by college students and locals for its samosas, and a solid bet for dal pakwan and chole-samosa too. It’s a stand-and-eat kind of place, priced for students, and worth the queue.

For a sit-down meal rather than a breakfast counter, Kailash Parbat — a long-established Sindhi name with roots in Colaba and outlets around the city and beyond — offers a more polished spread: sai bhaji, Sindhi kadhi, seyal preparations and Sindhi-style chaat in a proper restaurant setting. Budget higher here, more like a mid-range restaurant band.

In the northern suburbs, Thane has its own Sindhi spots (look for The Papad Co. and similar family kitchens) turning out dal pakwan, tuk, koki and Sindhi thalis. Names and outlets in this space shift, so check what’s currently open near you rather than travelling on faith.

A newer wave, too: modern Sindhi kitchens and cloud kitchens — the best-known being Sindhful, which grew from a delivery service into a restaurant — have made koki-with-chole, dal pakwan, arbi tuk and kadhi-chawal easy to order across the city. It’s often the simplest way to try the food if you’re nowhere near Chembur.

Ulhasnagar: the deep end

For the most unfiltered version of this cuisine, there’s Ulhasnagar, the large Sindhi-majority township on the far outskirts of the metropolitan region (on the Central Railway’s Karjat/Kasara-side network). Here dal pakwan and koki are everyday street food, sold from roadside stalls and small nashta houses to a crowd that grew up on it. It’s a longer haul from central Mumbai, but for anyone serious about Sindhi food it’s a rewarding pilgrimage — pair it with a wider day out using our day trips from Mumbai guide.

How to eat it well

• Go early for dal pakwan. It’s a breakfast dish, and the pakwan is at its crispest in the morning. Many joints wind down their Sindhi breakfast by late morning.
• Eat pakwan the right way — break it into the dal, spoon on both the tamarind and green chutneys, and eat with raw onion. Don’t be shy with the chutney.
• Order kadhi-chawal with tuk for a proper Sindhi lunch — the crisp fried potato against the tangy curry is the whole point.
• Try sai bhaji if you want the home-style side of the cuisine rather than the fried breakfast one; it’s lighter and greener than most people expect.
• Sundays are special. Several traditional spots do their fullest spreads — including kadhi and pakwan — on weekends, so a Sunday morning is a good time to go.

Getting there

Most of the action sits on Mumbai’s Central and Harbour lines. Chembur is on the Harbour Line (and the Monorail), with the breakfast joints a short walk or auto from the station. Sion is on the Central Line’s main corridor. Thane is a major Central Line junction further north. Ulhasnagar is well up the Central Line, roughly an hour-plus by fast train from the central suburbs — check timings before you set out. If you’d rather explore Chembur on foot as a neighbourhood, it slots neatly into a wider eastern-suburbs food wander.

The bottom line

Sindhi food rewards the effort of seeking it out. Point yourself at a plate of morning-fresh dal pakwan in Chembur, add a koki, and come back for kadhi-chawal with tuk and a bowl of sai bhaji — at VIG, Guru Kripa, Kailash Parbat or one of the newer kitchens. Do it early, do it with the chutney, and you’ll understand why a whole community has kept this food alive for three-quarters of a century.

FAQ

Where can I find the best dal pakwan in Mumbai?

Chembur is the heartland — VIG Refreshments in Chembur East is the classic morning spot for dal pakwan, and Jhama Sweets is another reliable option. Sion’s Guru Kripa and various Thane and Ulhasnagar eateries also do it well. Go in the morning, when the pakwan is freshest.

What is the difference between Sindhi kadhi and regular kadhi?

Sindhi kadhi has no yoghurt. It’s a tangy, tomato-and-tamarind curry thickened with roasted gram flour and packed with vegetables like drumstick, cluster beans and potato — quite different from the yoghurt-based kadhi found elsewhere in India. It’s typically eaten with rice as kadhi-chawal.

Is Sindhi food vegetarian?

The most famous Sindhi dishes in Mumbai — dal pakwan, sai bhaji, koki, Sindhi kadhi and tuk — are all vegetarian, which is why the community’s breakfast joints are largely vegetarian. Sindhi cuisine does include meat dishes, but the everyday Mumbai repertoire you’ll encounter is mostly veg.