Indian yoghurt dumpling dish thing

April 20, 2007 12:12 PM

Dey bareh (sp?). My Kashmiri wife is looking for a restaurant in London that serves this dish - basically cornflour/chickpea-flour dumplings in yoghurt. Any ideas? We live in Bloomsbury, so anywhere near there would be good.
posted by Mossy to food & drink (9 comments total)

No specific answers, but it definitely sounds like a chaat dish. Do any of the names listed on the bottom of this page ring a bell?
posted by theiconoclast31 at 12:31 PM on April 20, 2007

Dahi Bhalle?
posted by theiconoclast31 at 12:34 PM on April 20, 2007

Egad, I'm sorry. Ignore my responses, I thought you were looking for the name of the dish.
posted by theiconoclast31 at 12:37 PM on April 20, 2007

Hmmm, well, I'm not 100% sure about this restaurant - never been there - but IIRC this place, Chor Bizzare, has Kashmiri cuisine and as it's in W1, it's (relatively, London wise) close to you. The dish is not on the menu [pdf].

Kashmiri restaurants are not that common in London, but there are a fair few Punjabi ones. Could this dish have an alternative name? The dish sounds very familiar to me and I think I've had a variation of it on the curry mile in Manchester, probably at the Punjab - the best (mainly) vegetarian Indian restaurant in Manchester. It may be worth finding a good Northern Indian restaurant and asking if they can make it...
posted by davehat at 12:45 PM on April 20, 2007

This place has dahi bhalle (on the Royal Vegetarian set menu), but it might not be quite what you're looking for. This blog mentions dahi baray, which is probably what you're looking for, but I couldn't find anyplace that serves it in London.
posted by MsMolly at 12:49 PM on April 20, 2007

I think you're looking for dahi vaday -- "dahi" means yogurt, and a "vada" is a chickpea-flour dumpling. ("Vaday" is the plural form of "vada", and "bhalla" is equivalent to "vada".) It's basically north-Indian street food ("chaat"). Do you have chaat houses in the UK? (We do in California.)
posted by phliar at 3:25 PM on April 20, 2007

It's dhai vada - I've seen it as an appetizer in Indian restaurants and given the ridiculous number of indian/curry places you guys have over there, you should be able to find it pretty easily.
posted by echo0720 at 8:44 PM on April 20, 2007

I've seen two dishes that could qualify as your description. The first is large, doughnut shaped dumplings in spicy yoghurt. The second is small (almost pea-sized) dumplings that seem to be made of the same thing (soft, chickpea flour) in spicy yoghurt. While I know of the first from cookbooks etc, I haven't actually seen it anywhere in an Indian restaurant in this country before. In the case of the second, they used to offer it as one of the small dishes on the vegetarian thali tray at Masala Zone just off Carnaby Street. If you don't know it, Masala Zone is a small chain of almost fast-food Indian restaurants - kind of like an indian version of Wagamama. It's nothing special, but if the dish is right then I guess it might scratch your wife's itch.
posted by bifter at 3:29 AM on April 23, 2007

This dish, or one very like it (dumpling, yoghurt) is served as part of the lunch buffet most days at the Indian YMCA which, conveniently, is in Fitzroy Square, Bloomsbury. Enjoy!
posted by jimbaud at 5:00 AM on April 25, 2007