Fair Food Prices

Food culture

Mumbai's lunch hour runs on the dabbawala system, the network that hand-delivers tens of thousands of home-cooked lunchboxes from kitchens to offices every morning, so a large share of the city's workforce simply never orders lunch out. When people do eat out, the Irani cafés set up generations ago by Parsi immigrants remain their own institution — bun maska and chai at a marble-topped table — distinct from both street-cart snacks and the fine-dining rooms inside five-star hotels. A proper vegetarian thali, a full spread of small dishes for one set price, is the everyday version of a sit-down meal here, worth treating as its own category rather than just a pricier version of a street snack.