A dhaba, a garden, seventeen years on.

We opened on the old SG Highway in the spring of 2007 with one tandoor, a scattering of charpais, and the food we grew up eating in the Kathiyawad. Sev tameta cooked black in a karahi. Ringan no olo, the way our grandmothers turned it over the coals. Bajra rotlo, hot enough to burn your fingers. There was a road, some string lights, and a plan no more complicated than: cook this, well, for a long time.

Seventeen years passed the way they do in a good kitchen — quietly, then all at once. Word of the methi papad. The line for cheese butter masala on Sunday nights. Wedding parties that came back the next spring with the same aunts, wanting the same table. Somewhere along the way we outgrew the old plot. In 2024 we packed the tandoor, the charpais, and the daily bag of atta and moved a little way up the road to Sardar Patel Ring Road, beside Shaligram Lake View. A bigger garden. A proper banquet hall. Room, at last, for a hundred cousins.

The kitchen has not changed in seventeen years and it will not change in the next seventeen. We still make the roti by hand, still salt-cure the papads ourselves, still send you home with more than you meant to eat. What is new is only the garden — larger, older-feeling somehow, lit above the tables in a way the old place could never manage.

If you have not come yet, come at seven. If you have come before, come at seven anyway.

The kitchen at SG Dhaba