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Chai, Chaat & Chutney: A street food journey through India
Chetna Makan has travelled to the four corners of India - Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi and Chennai - sampling the extreme varieties of street food on offer. Each area has subtle differences in ingredients and techniques, making the cuisine completely unique and full of character.In Chai, Chaat & Chutney, Chetna has taken inspiration from the street and created delicious recipes that are simple to cook at home. The result is a completely fresh take on Indian cuisine - try Tamarind Stuffed Chillis, Chana Dal Vada with Coconut Chutney and Sticky Bombay Chicken from the South or let your senses venture to the North for Chole, one of the ultimate curries, sweet Carrot Halwa, Pani Puri and Cardamom & Pistachio Kulfi.
357 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 5, 2017
343 people are currently reading
681 people want to read
About the author
Chetna Makan
55 books72 followersI love to cook, whether its a simple chutney or a complicated recipe. I have been greatly inspired by my mum’s cooking who has taught me everything I know about flavours.
I trained as a fashion designer in Mumbai and moved to Broadstairs in Kent in 2003. I have always loved cooking but after having my 2 children I found my interest in baking grow. I am a creative yet meticulous baker, and find baking a perfect outlet for my creativity.
Trying out new techniques and challenging myself is what keeps me going. Being on Great British Bake Off 2014 has been an amazing journey and has given me the confidence to try new combinations of flavours. I will always cherish this experience and the time I spent in the tent with my fellow bakers.
I trained as a fashion designer in Mumbai and moved to Broadstairs in Kent in 2003. I have always loved cooking but after having my 2 children I found my interest in baking grow. I am a creative yet meticulous baker, and find baking a perfect outlet for my creativity.
Trying out new techniques and challenging myself is what keeps me going. Being on Great British Bake Off 2014 has been an amazing journey and has given me the confidence to try new combinations of flavours. I will always cherish this experience and the time I spent in the tent with my fellow bakers.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
May 30, 2018
We're eating our way through this. It set us back about $100 at our local Indian grocery, but the results have been unspeakably delicious. Great vegetarian selections.
December 31, 2017
Chetna Makan invites the reader to tour India in search of street food. She takes the food common to the streetside vendors and reduces their offerings to recipes which can be reproduced in modern Western kitchens. It is not necessary to buy a tandoor to cook what she cooks. The tour is arranged over four cities -- Chennai, Kolkata, Mumbai, and Dehli -- as being representative of the regional cuisines of India. Chetna Makan was born in central India but moved to the UK in 2003. Some may remember her from "The Great British Bake Off" of 2014 where she reached the semi-final. The photography is absolutely artistic and promotes the flavours of eating on the street in India. The addendum includes numerous chutney recipes which are exceptionally useful.
December 15, 2021
We got this from our library, but bought a copy from our local bookseller after making a few recipes.
Great recipes, easy to follow and prepare, not to mention delicious. Great photos, great stories, I love the background information. Chetna does a really nice job of providing a wide variety recipes for many ocassions (in spite on the "street food" designation). Evidently, Indian Street Food includes dishes from all of Asia. The recipe for Sticky Bombay Chicken alone (pp. 134) is worth the price of the book.
Great recipes, easy to follow and prepare, not to mention delicious. Great photos, great stories, I love the background information. Chetna does a really nice job of providing a wide variety recipes for many ocassions (in spite on the "street food" designation). Evidently, Indian Street Food includes dishes from all of Asia. The recipe for Sticky Bombay Chicken alone (pp. 134) is worth the price of the book.
January 4, 2022
This book is really interesting, a look at popular foods in different regions of India.
September 8, 2025
#Binge Reviewing my previous Reads #Indian Food
Chetna Makan’s Chai, Chaat & Chutney is not merely another cookbook trading on the vibrant colours of Indian street food; it is, instead, a kind of edible cartography, a way of tracing India’s enormous and often overwhelming diversity through the lens of its most democratic culinary form — food served in the open air, under the sway of monsoons and dust, improvised in stalls, carried in hand, and eaten in laughter.
From the very first pages, one senses that Makan is not interested in serving up sterilised recipes for a Western audience; she is inviting us to walk the streets with her, to feel the press of bodies in a Delhi bazaar, the metallic clang of ladles in a Lucknowi cart, and the way oil sputters against steel and fills the night air with fragrance.
The four great metropolitan stops she structures the book around — Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and Kolkata — are not simply coordinates on a map but nodes in a cultural and historical network where migration, memory, and appetite collide. For me, reading the book was not a polite act of recipe-gathering but a sensory journey that triggered recollections of my own wanderings: afternoons leaning over plates of golgappa in Delhi, evenings crushed into a Chowpatty crowd, mornings chasing idlis at a roadside stall in Mylapore, and late-night walks along Park Street where kati rolls are devoured in a blaze of sauce and smoke.
The most immediate impression one gets from Makan’s writing is her profound affection for the performative element of street food. Unlike home cooking, where intimacy and repetition shape memory, or fine dining, where polish and presentation dominate, street food is spectacle; it is theatre; it is improvisation.
Vendors shout to one another, hands move in rhythm, chutneys splash, pans hiss, batter is poured, turned, and flipped in seconds, and all this becomes part of the story of the dish. Makan writes recipes, yes, but she also captures the drama of encounter — the anticipation as you wait, the way flavours explode because they are assembled and eaten almost simultaneously. To capture that dynamism in the form of a hardback cookbook is not easy, but she manages it by intertwining narrative fragments with her instructions: a line about a boy waiting for chaat, an aside about how pani puri water is mixed in front of you, and a memory of watching a dosa being unfurled like a flag.
At the heart of the book lies the realisation that Indian street food is essentially an index of mobility and exchange. Each city’s snacks carry within them histories of migration, colonialism, trade, and adaptation. Delhi’s chaat owes as much to Mughal kitchens as it does to refugee influxes after Partition.
Mumbai’s vada pav is the working man’s quick carb fix, but it also carries Portuguese echoes in its bread and Maharashtrian street ingenuity in its spiced potato. Chennai’s idli and dosa might seem ancient and rooted, but they too are products of centuries of grain adaptation, fermentation practices, temple culture, and now, global café chains. Kolkata’s rolls and puchkas are not just snacks; they are living archives of colonial cosmopolitanism, from Armenian bakeries to Chinese immigrants shaping noodle dishes. Makan is not overtly a historian, yet by the very act of documenting these foods, she allows us to glimpse how cosmopolitanism is digested, how culture moves fastest not in textbooks but in frying pans.
What made the reading particularly resonant for me was how Makan refuses to sanitise the chaos. There is always a temptation, when packaging street food for hardback editions sold in Western markets, to make it neat: tidy photographs, simple instructions, and exoticism wrapped in accessibility. But Makan allows mess into her text — the mess of multiple chutneys, the variety of garnishing, the fact that no two pani puris ever taste the same because no two waters are spiced identically. In other words, she acknowledges street food as an ecology of difference, not a static recipe. This is crucial because street food is not meant to be replicated perfectly; it is meant to be experienced, and the book honours that by encouraging improvisation rather than blind reproduction.
Her recipes, of course, are the backbone, and they are surprisingly approachable. But I found myself less interested in following them step by step than in reading them as miniature narratives. Each one is a vignette: you can almost see the coriander being ground, the tamarind soaking, the batter rising, and the fritters puffing golden in oil. They read as scripts for sensory re-enactment rather than rigid formulas. In this sense, Chai, Chaat & Chutney belongs to that genre of cookbooks that are also travelogues, cultural essays disguised as culinary manuals.
Another thread that runs through the book is gender, though not foregrounded. Street food in India is often a male-dominated space — vendors are men, and cooking is public, loud, and aggressive. Yet Makan’s presence as a woman moving through these spaces, recording, tasting, and translating, itself becomes a quiet rebalancing. She does not dwell on this explicitly, but her gaze is different: she notices textures, gestures, small kindnesses, and the choreography of vendors and customers. Her writing is not just about devouring but about observing, about understanding the labour behind the spectacle. In a sense, she gives voice to the streets, not just as a consumer but as a witness.
Reading the book in the context of other Indian food narratives, I could not help but compare it with Madhur Jaffrey’s works, which emphasise home cooking and diaspora kitchens, or with colonial memoir-cookbooks like Jennifer Brennan’s Curries & Bugles, which carry nostalgia for vanished domesticities.
Makan’s project is radically different: she is not reconstructing a home kitchen, nor memorialising colonial pasts. She is celebrating the ongoing, noisy, democratic vitality of public food. Her stage is not the drawing room but the pavement. And that matters. Because in contemporary India, where class divides often stratify taste, street food remains a space of surprising egalitarianism — everyone queues at the same cart, whether banker or rickshaw driver, student or tourist. That democratic possibility infuses her writing, making it less about elite nostalgia and more about lived contemporary culture.
Of course, there is a degree of romanticisation. Anyone who has actually eaten at a Delhi chaat stall knows the dust, the hygiene concerns, and the overcrowding. But Makan manages to avoid over-sanitisation while still conveying joy. She captures the vibrancy without pretending away the reality. And perhaps that is what street food is: a negotiation between risk and delight, between the knowledge that the water may be dubious and the irresistible explosion of flavour that makes the risk worthwhile.
As a reader, what stays with me most after closing the book are not individual recipes but the cumulative sensation of movement. The book itself reads like a walk: each page a new stop, each recipe a new vendor, each anecdote a new street corner. The four cities serve as anchors, but the experience is one of continual drift, as though you are meandering through a giant bazaar of flavours. That drifting quality, that refusal to be pinned down, mirrors India itself: diverse, cacophonous, impossible to summarise, but irresistible nonetheless.
In the end, Chai, Chaat & Chutney succeeds not just as a cookbook but as a sensory ethnography. It teaches us that food is never just sustenance; it is memory, migration, theatre, survival, and joy. It insists that to understand India, one must eat in its streets, not only in its homes or its restaurants. And it leaves me, as a reader, craving not simply to replicate a recipe in my kitchen but to be back at a stall, fingers sticky with chutney, ears filled with the call of vendors, heart opened by the democratic intimacy of food shared in public.
Chetna Makan’s Chai, Chaat & Chutney is not merely another cookbook trading on the vibrant colours of Indian street food; it is, instead, a kind of edible cartography, a way of tracing India’s enormous and often overwhelming diversity through the lens of its most democratic culinary form — food served in the open air, under the sway of monsoons and dust, improvised in stalls, carried in hand, and eaten in laughter.
From the very first pages, one senses that Makan is not interested in serving up sterilised recipes for a Western audience; she is inviting us to walk the streets with her, to feel the press of bodies in a Delhi bazaar, the metallic clang of ladles in a Lucknowi cart, and the way oil sputters against steel and fills the night air with fragrance.
The four great metropolitan stops she structures the book around — Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and Kolkata — are not simply coordinates on a map but nodes in a cultural and historical network where migration, memory, and appetite collide. For me, reading the book was not a polite act of recipe-gathering but a sensory journey that triggered recollections of my own wanderings: afternoons leaning over plates of golgappa in Delhi, evenings crushed into a Chowpatty crowd, mornings chasing idlis at a roadside stall in Mylapore, and late-night walks along Park Street where kati rolls are devoured in a blaze of sauce and smoke.
The most immediate impression one gets from Makan’s writing is her profound affection for the performative element of street food. Unlike home cooking, where intimacy and repetition shape memory, or fine dining, where polish and presentation dominate, street food is spectacle; it is theatre; it is improvisation.
Vendors shout to one another, hands move in rhythm, chutneys splash, pans hiss, batter is poured, turned, and flipped in seconds, and all this becomes part of the story of the dish. Makan writes recipes, yes, but she also captures the drama of encounter — the anticipation as you wait, the way flavours explode because they are assembled and eaten almost simultaneously. To capture that dynamism in the form of a hardback cookbook is not easy, but she manages it by intertwining narrative fragments with her instructions: a line about a boy waiting for chaat, an aside about how pani puri water is mixed in front of you, and a memory of watching a dosa being unfurled like a flag.
At the heart of the book lies the realisation that Indian street food is essentially an index of mobility and exchange. Each city’s snacks carry within them histories of migration, colonialism, trade, and adaptation. Delhi’s chaat owes as much to Mughal kitchens as it does to refugee influxes after Partition.
Mumbai’s vada pav is the working man’s quick carb fix, but it also carries Portuguese echoes in its bread and Maharashtrian street ingenuity in its spiced potato. Chennai’s idli and dosa might seem ancient and rooted, but they too are products of centuries of grain adaptation, fermentation practices, temple culture, and now, global café chains. Kolkata’s rolls and puchkas are not just snacks; they are living archives of colonial cosmopolitanism, from Armenian bakeries to Chinese immigrants shaping noodle dishes. Makan is not overtly a historian, yet by the very act of documenting these foods, she allows us to glimpse how cosmopolitanism is digested, how culture moves fastest not in textbooks but in frying pans.
What made the reading particularly resonant for me was how Makan refuses to sanitise the chaos. There is always a temptation, when packaging street food for hardback editions sold in Western markets, to make it neat: tidy photographs, simple instructions, and exoticism wrapped in accessibility. But Makan allows mess into her text — the mess of multiple chutneys, the variety of garnishing, the fact that no two pani puris ever taste the same because no two waters are spiced identically. In other words, she acknowledges street food as an ecology of difference, not a static recipe. This is crucial because street food is not meant to be replicated perfectly; it is meant to be experienced, and the book honours that by encouraging improvisation rather than blind reproduction.
Her recipes, of course, are the backbone, and they are surprisingly approachable. But I found myself less interested in following them step by step than in reading them as miniature narratives. Each one is a vignette: you can almost see the coriander being ground, the tamarind soaking, the batter rising, and the fritters puffing golden in oil. They read as scripts for sensory re-enactment rather than rigid formulas. In this sense, Chai, Chaat & Chutney belongs to that genre of cookbooks that are also travelogues, cultural essays disguised as culinary manuals.
Another thread that runs through the book is gender, though not foregrounded. Street food in India is often a male-dominated space — vendors are men, and cooking is public, loud, and aggressive. Yet Makan’s presence as a woman moving through these spaces, recording, tasting, and translating, itself becomes a quiet rebalancing. She does not dwell on this explicitly, but her gaze is different: she notices textures, gestures, small kindnesses, and the choreography of vendors and customers. Her writing is not just about devouring but about observing, about understanding the labour behind the spectacle. In a sense, she gives voice to the streets, not just as a consumer but as a witness.
Reading the book in the context of other Indian food narratives, I could not help but compare it with Madhur Jaffrey’s works, which emphasise home cooking and diaspora kitchens, or with colonial memoir-cookbooks like Jennifer Brennan’s Curries & Bugles, which carry nostalgia for vanished domesticities.
Makan’s project is radically different: she is not reconstructing a home kitchen, nor memorialising colonial pasts. She is celebrating the ongoing, noisy, democratic vitality of public food. Her stage is not the drawing room but the pavement. And that matters. Because in contemporary India, where class divides often stratify taste, street food remains a space of surprising egalitarianism — everyone queues at the same cart, whether banker or rickshaw driver, student or tourist. That democratic possibility infuses her writing, making it less about elite nostalgia and more about lived contemporary culture.
Of course, there is a degree of romanticisation. Anyone who has actually eaten at a Delhi chaat stall knows the dust, the hygiene concerns, and the overcrowding. But Makan manages to avoid over-sanitisation while still conveying joy. She captures the vibrancy without pretending away the reality. And perhaps that is what street food is: a negotiation between risk and delight, between the knowledge that the water may be dubious and the irresistible explosion of flavour that makes the risk worthwhile.
As a reader, what stays with me most after closing the book are not individual recipes but the cumulative sensation of movement. The book itself reads like a walk: each page a new stop, each recipe a new vendor, each anecdote a new street corner. The four cities serve as anchors, but the experience is one of continual drift, as though you are meandering through a giant bazaar of flavours. That drifting quality, that refusal to be pinned down, mirrors India itself: diverse, cacophonous, impossible to summarise, but irresistible nonetheless.
In the end, Chai, Chaat & Chutney succeeds not just as a cookbook but as a sensory ethnography. It teaches us that food is never just sustenance; it is memory, migration, theatre, survival, and joy. It insists that to understand India, one must eat in its streets, not only in its homes or its restaurants. And it leaves me, as a reader, craving not simply to replicate a recipe in my kitchen but to be back at a stall, fingers sticky with chutney, ears filled with the call of vendors, heart opened by the democratic intimacy of food shared in public.
September 8, 2020
Brimming with enthusiasm for street food in India, backed up with recipes suited to Western kitchens (although some ingredients may need online ordering). The nature of fast food cooked and eaten on the street means that many dishes are deep-fat fried. Fine for a treat, not so fine for every day. Offsetting the fried food, the author has many recipes for vegetarian and vegan dishes. The relatively few dishes that are not vegetarian use chicken or fish, and she often includes notes on how to adapt for a vegetarian dish. Overall I would say there are more healthy choices than not in this book. The story is amplified with many lush photographs, of the sources of Indian street food and of how most of the recipes look when completed. Tempting visually.
October 23, 2018
I treated this more as a delightful picture book rather than a cookbook I would use. There's a fair number of fun photos and some nice personal stories and a few potentially interesting recipes. For the most part street food is deep fried which is something I don't do at home, so most of these I won't be trying. There's also some ingredients that are confusing to me, what's the difference between Indian chilli powder and the myriad of Mexican chili powders?
The author has written a more general purpose home cook book that might be worth a peek.
The author has written a more general purpose home cook book that might be worth a peek.
April 12, 2018
A gorgeous, inspiring book full of the flavours of Indian street food. Former Great British Bake-Off contestant Chetna Makan travels through the major cities of Indian, observing all the street food trends and then translating them into recipes for the home cook. Nicely arranged, amazing photos. Read a full review at Food Book Feast: http://www.foodbookfeast.com/2018/04/...
April 28, 2018
This book was beautiful and made me want to go back to India to eat some of the amazing street food…the chais I had everyone that left a permanent burn on my tongue and the roof of my mouth; the momos from Dharamshala that were served in coffee filters and so good, the ten rupee samosas inevitably served in newspapers...she tries to make some of the recipes a bit more healthy, but this was a really fun book to look through. Makes me a bit "homesick" for India. Can't wait to go back.
November 28, 2020
I learnt about this book on youtube! The electric shock challenge with Sorted Food video was so entertaining and informative. Pea and potato samosas are my favorite. The recipes in this book are easy to follow and come out exactly as expected. I hope to visit India one day and sample all the delicious street food.
Thank You Chetna.
Thank You Chetna.
Read
February 28, 2021I decided I could count cookbooks for my total as long as I read them cover to cover. This is an accessible book, with recipes and techniques that seem like I could achieve them, if I stocked up at the local Indian grocer first. Hardly anything in here is something I’ve made before, which is exciting! Less pictures than I would like though.
July 2, 2017
Amazing street food cook book
Author has done good travelling across four cities in India to taste and collect the mouth watering recipes of street foods. The photos along with recipe is sure enough to trigger your taste buds to be watery
Author has done good travelling across four cities in India to taste and collect the mouth watering recipes of street foods. The photos along with recipe is sure enough to trigger your taste buds to be watery
December 20, 2017
I tried several recipes out of this book and all of them turned out excellent. Instructions are succinct and clear. Little useful tips are helpful even for the experienced cook. Photos, layout and the design of the book is breathtaking.
September 8, 2018
A lot of really good recipes.
There are quite a few ingredients that may not be readily available everywhere.
There are quite a few ingredients that may not be readily available everywhere.
November 15, 2018
Interesting descriptions, clear easy to read and follow recipes. I really love that the recipe is all on one page.
September 24, 2019
I really like how accessible this makes the recipes. Definitely on my "books to look for" list.
February 7, 2020
Though I doubt my ability to make most of the things in this book, I definitely wish I could try them all.
June 7, 2020
A great book full of great recipes
Overall a great book, very interesting good recipes all round some I'll try making aswell some sound delicious good for a quick read
Overall a great book, very interesting good recipes all round some I'll try making aswell some sound delicious good for a quick read
January 1, 2021
YES I READ THIS AS A BOOK. Delicious delicious delicious. Nom nom nom. Want want want.
August 26, 2021
Loved this sundry journey through some of the states of India. I have spent my holiday try out some of the more unusual dishes and loved them!
November 7, 2021
I love Chetna and her wonderful food! This is an Indian cookbook with recipes that are within reach for those of us unfamiliar with cooking -- but fans of eating -- Indian food.
September 3, 2024
I want to eat almost everything in this book. The pictures are very appetizing and I enjoyed Chetna's paragraph introduction to each recipe. Given that this is street food, it's more likely that I'd order one of the items at a restaurant than make them at home. I am looking forward to the next cookbook at home for some new dinner ideas, though.
November 9, 2024
Theek hi hai, kuchh khaas nahin hai
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews