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I’m sick to death of hidden gems. You’ll find them all over Mumbai and your social media feeds, most commonly ‘tucked away in a quiet bylane in Bandra’, but there’s a cookie-cutter staleness that seems inescapable. But there’s a supper club-cloud kitchen hybrid bucking traditions and hurtling headlong into its own territory. Curritos deems itself an experience that reimagines India’s regional curries in new forms, but actually sitting down for a meal is more like an immersion into the explorations and innovations of the hosts - Anurag Parab and Neerja Deodhar.
The idea was born from audacity, and Anurag is the first to admit it. When dining out, the thought often flitted through his mind that he might be able to make this at home. And unlike most, it turns out that he could. Not through any expert training, but a sheer determination to achieve results on his terms. That vision plus an inspirational trip to Japan convinced him that bringing the dream to life was possible, and now, at a small table that seats four, Curritos is dishing up the fruits of his labour.
(L) Neerja Deodhar (R) Anurag Parab
The small format does something that most restaurants struggle to do - innovate and deliver jaw-dropping results within a format that leaves no room for error. Most tasting menus at this price point come with an unspoken promise. Spend three or four thousand rupees on dinner, and you expect to be handed something you'd never bother making at home - prawns, good mutton, a nub of well-sourced pork. So there's a quiet audacity in a supper club that sits you down and serves you chicken. Course after course of it. A quiet ‘F you’ to overdressed plates and pretentious ‘fusion flavours’. “The other thing about chicken is that it's a plain canvas upon which you can paint using whatever colour you want,” adds Anurag.
Much of it is inspired by a trip they took to Japan, but it also comes from their family heritage. “We were also conscious that while we were showcasing the wealth of India’s chicken curries, they weren’t just ‘Northern curries’,” says Anurag. While the curries are the defining factor of every course, the shifting factor is the carbs. “We wanted to make sure the protein was the star of the dish, and the carbs were the foil of sorts, helping them shine brighter,” adds Neerja. The cadence was very important to them. Each course plays a distinct role with careful portions and an intentional rhythm to the meal, it was designed to leave you full and happy, but wanting more.
Curritos - The Curry Burrito
To satiate that yearning, they’ve started a weekend home delivery service with two signature curries, reimagined as burritos and sent out with a mole sauce that took months to craft to perfection. It’s one of his passion projects and he threw everything but the kitchen sink at formulating the right flavour. The sauce is deepened with chillies from around the country, nuts, biscuits, even slow cooked plantains, and it proves the theory that Indian and Mexican cuisines can be two sides of the same coin when treated right.
That's the wager the hosts here have made, and it's a considered one. Chicken, as they see it, is a plain canvas you can paint any colour you like. It's also where most of us began our relationship with meat, which makes it the perfect thing to reintroduce to a room full of adventurous eaters who think they've moved on to fancier things. The trick (and the fun) lies in taking dishes that are traditionally built around other proteins entirely and coaxing chicken into the role without letting the quality dip. Everything arrives from their kitchen, made from scratch by a couple who took up cooking relatively recently and now approach it with the obsessiveness of converts. What follows is a tour of the country, one bird at a time.
Black Sesame Chicken
Black Sesame Chicken
The meal opens quietly, and cold. This one takes its cue from dohneiiong, the black-sesame chicken of Meghalaya, and leans into the ingredient's smoky, roasted depth. It's served tucked into a betel leaf, a clever bit of contrast, the leaf's fresh, faintly peppery bite cutting straight through the richness of the sesame. While some people balk at the idea of eating cold chicken, it’s another part of Anurag’s personal vendetta to smash through preconceptions about the meat. A gentle, intriguing way to begin, and a signal that the menu isn't going to behave itself, it’s here to break the rules.
Andhra Green Chilli Chicken
Andhra Green Chilli Chicken
Here's a dish with a good backstory and a mild identity crisis. Despite the name, it isn't really from Andhra Pradesh at all. It was perfected in the military hotels and eateries of Bengaluru, which borrowed the state's fiery reputation to shift plates. The name promised heat, and the drinkers signed up with gusto. The reality is subtler. Chicken is slow-cooked with thinly sliced onions and green chillies until the chillies' pungency mellows and the onions' natural sweetness fuses into the meat's juices. It looks alarming and tastes measured, a neat demonstration of the hosts' own theory that anything too spicy for a normal person to enjoy has usually lost the plot, and the flavour, along the way.
Then there's the vessel. It's served inside a crisp made purely of chicken skin, no cornflour, no batter, just skin, salt, and the faintest breath of smoke, its fat rendered slowly under a press. It is fiddly, unglamorous work which Anurg perfected through painstaking hours of trial and error. The skin curls the instant it hits heat, tears if you rush it, and demands long minutes of patient wrangling with a pair of tongs. The payoff is a shatteringly crisp shell that tastes intensely, unapologetically addictive.
Chicken Kuzhumbu
Chicken Kuzhambu
Kuzhambu translates loosely from Tamil as "stew" or "mixed", and this Tamil Nadu staple is exactly the sort of lively, homestyle curry the word suggests, chicken simmered in a fresh coconut-and-spice masala with shallots, curry leaves, and green chillies. It's the kind of robust, everyday cooking that rarely makes it onto a tasting menu, which is part of the point.
The showmanship is underneath it in a toasted rice cake that looks deceptively simple but was actually the product of a long and slightly comic run of kitchen experiments. Getting rice to hold its shape without a binder so it can be shallow-fried into something you can actually pick up turns out to be genuinely difficult, Anurag discovered. An early prototype was a plate-sized slab shaped like a giant slice of toast, so enormous that three people couldn't finish it. The version that made the menu uses set sushi rice, with a thin spread of cream cheese to cut the oil and add a little indulgence. Small details, but hard-won for the perfect bite.
Chicken Mappas
Chicken Mappas
Chicken pot pie on its Kerala sojourn, this is hands down the soul food of the menu. Mappas is a mild curry shaped by centuries of the spice trade and beloved of Kerala's Syrian Christian community, a dish more often made with duck, here reworked for chicken without losing an ounce of its character. Red and pearl onions are sautéed in coconut oil with a generous heap of fresh curry leaves; the meat then simmers in fresh coconut milk, which gives the curry its signature velvety texture and swaps aggressive heat for warm, aromatic depth.
Crowning it is a flourish born by accident. One rainy Sunday morning, over tea and khari biscuits, Neerja wondered what would happen if you poured curry over khari. Khari, of course, collapses on contact, so they married the idea to the hot pies they were already making that monsoon. The result is a pie crust that rises high and golden, taken almost to the edge of burning for colour, lifting like a small souffle ready to crack open and reveal the treasure within. A little bakery nostalgia to add to the drama of the moment.
Malvani Chicken
Malvani Chicken
For their favourite finale curry, the hosts do something unexpected - they serve it as a ramen. A deeply flavourful broth, noodles, and the smoky, red-hued Malvani masala at its heart.
This is the cooking of the khanavals, the small eateries dotted along the Konkan coast, and the masala is the real labour here, a fifteen-spice blend whose deep red can look intimidating. The heat comes from a mix of local chillies, but it's soulful rather than punishing, softened by a touch of coconut. Along that coast, families still spend entire summers sun-drying and roasting the spice mix to keep the tradition alive. Finished with spring onions and curry leaves, it arrives with a warm fragrant welcome and disappears in contented silence.
By the time you’re wrapping up the meal, your dining companions have become friends and your esteem for chicken is through the roof. And once the last of the pie crust is gone, what lingers isn't the novelty of the concept, it's how quickly you forget it was ever a concept at all. Somewhere between the betel leaf and the coconut milk, the question of ‘why chicken’ stops mattering and the far better question of what next takes over. That's the real sleight of hand here, a menu that could read as a stunt turns out to be an argument, made gently and course by course, for paying proper attention to the most familiar thing on the table. For a self taught, home cook doling out food from the same kitchen where they make their morning coffee, Anurag and Neerja pull off feats that seasoned chefs would envy. You arrive braced for a gimmick and leave having eaten your way across the country, a little humbled, and if your hosts have done their job, quietly plotting your return.
To book a spot at the supper club, order your own burrito or simply be entertained, find Curritos Club on Instagram.
