How long does it take to fry onions and tomato for the base of a dish? For Chef Hussain Shahzad, around 45 minutes. In the kadhai goes ghee, fortified with kewra water and rosewater. Once it stops sputtering, chopped onions go in, caramelised slowly until golden brown.
We are at Hussain’s home in Bandra, a stone’s throw from Veronica’s and Papa’s. He moved to this home over two years ago, ahead of the launch of Papa’s — the 12-seater tasting-menu restaurant, easily the hardest reservation in the country right now. His cosy kitchen — dark wood, patterned tiles, a wooden rendition of The Last Supper, playful ‘Ramen’ and ‘Sandwichshop’ signs — is spotless now, though it wasn’t always this way. It changed after Gautmi Sudhakar, his partner, entered his life.
“It used to be a bar, a bachelor pad,” he says. It didn’t even have a mirror until a month ago. It’s also where half the city’s most sought-after chefs land up, after a busy Saturday night; his bond with Varun Totlani of Masque is particularly warm. “It’s hard to come by, because we all work such tough years,” he says, stirring onions.
Masoor Dal Pulao by chef Hussain Shahzad
Today, though, isn’t about the restaurant. He is making his mother’s masoor pulao — a dish he ate once a week growing up in a Bohri household in Chennai, on days the family didn’t eat meat. “Aloo was the default meat option. Mum would put fried aloo in to entice us.” He wrote the recipe down only a few years ago, putting it on The Bombay Canteen’s monsoon menu in 2023, topped with crispy fried potatoes to relive his nostalgia. It returned to the menu again in 2025.
The recipe came from his paternal grandmother, passed to his mother, who made it her own.
“This is a very Bombay-style version,” he says, adding overnight-soaked dal to a pressure cooker for two whistles. It’s built in two parts: the dal, cooked almost dry, holding its shape but turning “moussey” when pressed between the palms; and the rice, layered on top. Potatoes, soy chunks, boiled eggs or meat can go in — but in tribute to the original, he leaves it as it always was.
Back to the kadhai, it’s time for the seasoning. “Allow spices to bloom, not burn,” he says. Tomatoes go in, cooked till they break down into a thick base. Rushing is where most people go wrong, he says, adding that it’s also why restaurant food tastes so different from home food. The patience he shows in caramelising onions mirrors his career — staying at it, one dish, one menu, one restaurant at a time, before the awards, the interviews, the cover stories came his way.
Cooking, for Hussain, began as a necessity long before it became his love language. “When my parents got divorced, I went to stay with my mom. She started working to support me and my younger brother Abbas,” he says. With no one home after school, a 14-year-old Hussain began mimicking a roadside vendor’s bread omelette. “That bread omelette outside Alsa Mall is where it all began.” Cold coffee came next, then recipes lifted off Sanjeev Kapoor’s Khana Khazana, scribbled down live off the TV.
This passion led him to culinary school in Manipal, a stint with the Oberoi Group, then Eleven Madison Park in New York, where watching chefs embrace their own heritage made him question why he hadn’t embraced his. There, he met the late Chef Floyd Cardoz, co-founder and culinary director of Hunger Inc, and felt he had found someone doing something genuinely relevant with Indian food. Hussain moved to Mumbai in 2015 as a sous chef at The Bombay Canteen, unsure Indian cooking was even his lane. By the second or third menu, he knew this was it.
Eleven years on, he is executive chef across the group — The Bombay Canteen, O Pedro, Veronica’s and Papa’s. In 2023, the former Jude Bakery space came up — Veronica’s below, Papa’s in the attic above. “My first thought was we can’t even have a loo! But we decided to do a counter. I said it’ll be a performance, a theatre,” an idea he calls a collaboration of dreams shared with co-founders Sameer Seth and Yash Bhanage.
Papa’s, by his own admission, was the menu that broke him the hardest — eight months to develop, the canvas completely blank. Today, it presents an elevated and adventurous take on comforting forms and flavours, putting a culture-defying stamp on Indian cuisine and dining traditions.
Back at the stove, he layers the pulao: smoked masoor dal at the base of a heavy-bottomed pan, mint and coriander leaves scattered over, then rice, finished with a generous pour of ghee. The lid goes on tight, and it sits on dum for 10-15 minutes. When he finally spoons it into a large bowl, there’s something unmistakably boyish on his face — the same kid once copying recipes off the television screen, now running the most talked-about kitchen in the country, still finding joy in the one dish that never left.
Chef Hussain Shahzad speaks during a Chef at Home interview session at his residence at Bandra West in Mumbai.
(Express photo by Sankhadeep Banerjee)
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Recipe for Smoked Masoor Pulao
Masoor Dal
Ingredients: 2½ cups dried masoor dal, ¼ cup ghee, ½ tsp coriander powder, ½ tsp red chilli powder, ½ tsp turmeric powder and water as needed
Method: Heat ghee in a press cooker. Add turmeric, coriander and chilli powder. Cook for 30 seconds. Add dal and enough water to cover. Cook until just tender but still holding its shape. Strain, reserving the cooking liquid for the rice.
Caramelised Onion Masala
Ingredients: 2 medium onions (thinly sliced), 1 large tomato (sliced), 1½ tbsp garlic paste, 2 tsp ginger paste, 2 tsp green chilli paste, ½ cup ghee, ½ tsp turmeric powder, 1 tsp Kashmiri red chilli powder, 1 tsp coriander powder, ½ tsp cumin powder, ½ tsp garam masala, 1 tsp rose water, 1 tsp kewra water, 1 piece charcoal (optional)
Method: Heat ghee. Add rose water and kewra water. Add onions and cook slowly until deeply caramelised. Add garlic, ginger and green chilli pastes; cook until the raw smell disappears.
Add the spices and cook for 1–2 minutes. Now add tomato and cook until completely broken down into a thick masala. Mix the masala into the cooked dal.
For the smoky flavour, place a bowl of hot charcoal in the centre of the dal. Drizzle 1 tsp ghee over the charcoal, cover and smoke for 5-7 minutes.
Pulao Rice
Ingredients: 2½ cups basmati rice, ¼ cup ghee, 1 medium onion, thinly sliced, 10-12 green cardamom pods, 2 green chillies (slit), 2-3 cloves, 1 tbsp chopped garlic, 1 tbsp chopped ginger, 5 cups reserved dal stock, a handful each of chopped coriander and mint, and salt to taste
Method: Heat ghee in a heavy pot. Add cardamom and cloves; cook until fragrant. Add garlic, ginger and green chillies; saute for 1 minute. Add onion and cook until lightly golden. Add dal stock and bring to a boil. Add rice and salt. Cook until the rice is about 90% done; drain excess liquid, if any.
Spread the smoked masoor dal in a heavy-bottomed pot. Layer the rice over it. Drizzle with 1 tbsp ghee, cover tightly and cook on dum over very low heat for 10–15 minutes. Rest for 5 minutes, then gently fluff. Garnish with mint and coriander and serve.
Chef Hussain Shahzad making smoked masoor dal pulao at his Bandra home. (Photo by Sankhadeep Banerjee) 
Masoor Dal Pulao by chef Hussain Shahzad
Chef Hussain Shahzad speaks during a Chef at Home interview session at his residence at Bandra West in Mumbai.
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