Char-koni naan, lukhmi, paya shorba, nihari: What Hyderabad eats for breakfast

In Purani Haveli, a neighbourhood in the old city named after the old residence of the Nizam (also called Haveli Kadeem), which houses the Nizam’s Museum, stands a cluster of naan shops of varied size and prestige. They fire up their iron tandoors, fixed into raised platforms at the shopfront, at the crack of dawn to bake Hyderabad’s famous naan rotis. I reach Purani Haveli around eight in the morning, looking for a specific shop: Khadeem Munshi Naan. Khalil, a loquacious autorickshaw driver I met outside the Golconda Fort (another excruciating climb), had willingly agreed to take me on all my early-morning expeditions in the city. In his late forties and a father of three teenagers, Khalil tells me he loves to eat and knows all the best places to eat and shop in Hyderabad. It is he who tells me that the best biscuits are made by Subhan Bakery (let no one tell you otherwise), that pearl shops at the Charminar are to be avoided (he knows better places), and where to find the best nihari shops in the old city. Khalil rolls to a halt right in front of the historic Khadeem Munshi Naan.

The owner, who introduces himself as Khaja Abdul Hameed, sits on the front porch flanked by two teenage boys, the three spreading out freshly baked naan like a pack of cards. Beside him, a tall glass showcase is stacked with more naan. Two men work around the tandoor, a giant hole dug into the ground. They place square pieces of dough on a small straw cushion and fearlessly reach into the glowing belly of the tandoor to slap the dough onto its walls. Another flicks out the cooked ones with an iron rod. They have changed colour, like an ermine’s coat, from white to a delicious golden brown, with a smattering of sunspots. It’s clear that Munshi Naan enjoys some celebrity and is used to curious enthusiasts enquiring about the shop, because Hameed hands me a pamphlet with its history printed in English and Urdu as soon as I mention my research.

The shop was founded in 1851 by Mohammed Hussain Saheb, purportedly a munshi (clerk) under the fourth Nizam, Nasir-ud-Dowla, who named the shop after his profession. “It’s made with a simple dough, flour, oil, water, and salt, and khameer prepared with a mix of curd and flour. The dough is hung up to rise through the night. During winters, when the temperatures drop, we add a few special ingredients like jauz to expedite fermentation,” he tells me. Before I can move on to my next question, he asks if I’d like to see the process. I agree at once. Who wouldn’t want to explore a bakery more than 170 years old? Little do I know that only months later, the place would be torn down to make way for a metro-rail project, another slice of the past, sacrificed at the altar of urban development.

A couple of dangerously slippery stairs and a close brush with the heat of the tandoor led me to the workshop behind. Inside, shirts hang on pegs on the wall, and wooden shelves and planks are stacked. The process reminds me of a relay. In one corner, three men in flour-dusted clothes sit in a lopsided circle, working in rhythm. One tears off large lumps from hand-rolled logs of springy dough and deftly rolls them between his palms into conical roundels with the nonchalance of long practice; the second rolls the dough balls into perfect circles before flicking them over to the third coworker, who uses a metal mould to cut them into perfect squares with the press of a lever. He lays them out on wooden planks and pushes them to the fourth, who works alone on the other side of the room, adding the final flourish to the naan. His tool is a small, thin-toothed comb, a few teeth at either end broken off. He presses the comb down in the centre, vertically and horizontally, to make a serrated cross, then proceeds to make holes with his index fingers at great speed. The planks are sent out to the tandoor, where the breads are brushed with jaggery water and ceded to the heat. The naan rotis are a breakfast favourite but are eaten throughout the day in different combinations. They are also baked in other shapes, round, star, heart, or betel leaf, each for specific occasions.

The char-koni naan, which Hameed calls “the poor man’s breakfast”, is essential at old Hyderabad’s no-frills breakfast joints, served with piping-hot bowls of nihari or paya shorba, a soupy dish of trotters rich with spices and collagen. Around Hyderabad’s old city, numerous hotels (as eateries and restaurants are called) with names like Victoria and Imperial open early to serve a typical Hyderabadi breakfast, mostly to blue-collar workers and local shop owners and traders. Not all of them serve nihari, though. The telltale sign that a shop is serving nihari is the large, rotund, thick-walled vessels kept at the entrance. These vessels are called shab deg, or “overnight pots”, in which the nihari is cooked on mellow heat all through the night. Across the old city, utensil shops and workshops make these deg that are often stacked on the pavement outside.

A similar deg, and the distinct smell of black stone flower wafting out of it, greets me at Nayaab, a slightly gentrified eatery and breakfast favourite a short walk from the Charminar. At seven in the morning, the place is full, but the earlier rush hour is over. Nayaab is located in an area called Chhatta Bazaar, also a major newspaper-distribution hub where activity begins early, and the bustle spills over into the restaurant. Many come in for a hefty meal that will fortify them for the day before leaving for work. Others flock to the eatery at the crack of dawn, the faithful after their morning prayers or late-night partygoers and IT professionals returning from long night shifts in Hyderabad’s booming IT and BPO sectors. This melding of dinner and breakfast is an upshot of Hyderabad’s transformation, in the past few decades, from a historical and cultural centre into a global tech and innovation hub. “There are two kinds of people in Hyderabad now, those who wake up at the crack of dawn, and those who go to sleep with the rising sun,” laughs Junaid, a tall, sprightly young man in his twenties and the second-generation owner of Nayaab, when he meets me at the entrance.

Inside Nayaab, massive pots of milk bubble beside a row of lidded kettles used to make dum ki chai. On the countertop are trays heaped with thin-skinned samosas, deep-fried chillies, and flaky pastry squares called lukhmi, another Hyderabadi speciality. Lokma means “morsel”, although lukhmi is more than a single bite: large, brawny parcels of greasy pastry and spiced mince. The setting, clean and well lit, is functional, with rows of long tables and benches often shared among strangers. Men eat silently at the tables, tearing char-koni naan into small chunks and dunking them into bowls of paya nihari so the bread can soak up the gravy and fluff up with its spicy juices.

Junaid takes me to an air-conditioned family section at the back. Traditional breakfast spaces have been, and continue to be, predominantly male spaces, although most eateries, especially the popular ones, now have a family section. We walk through a large kitchen, buzzing with activity, where ten to twelve people potter about with urgency, deftly navigating their way with trays full of food, past massive pots of curries and roiling kadhais of hot oil. Social media has catapulted Nayaab onto the must-do list of visitors to the city, and it draws families from around Hyderabad for a social breakfast of the city’s meaty specialities.

Junaid passes me his mobile phone. “Watch this video,” he says. The clip, shot from inside the eatery, shows shutters shuddering from being banged on, accompanied with screams and shouts; the moment the shutter is pulled up, scores of enthused youngsters rush in with the jubilation one typically sees at concerts and sports stadiums. “This is at three in the morning, during Ramadan”, says Junaid, visibly proud. Nayaab rolls out a special Suhur (pre-fast pre-dawn meal) menu during Ramadan that pulls in massive crowds.

Excerpted with permission from First Bite: Breakfast Stories from Urban India, Priyadarshini Chatterjee, Speaking Tiger Books.