“Listen to me, don’t eat biryani at Tundey. Instead, try the one at Shakeel in the next lane. If you don’t like it, I’ll pay for it myself,” our rickshaw puller, who has apparently been eavesdropping on our non-stop chatter about food, tells us in his Lucknavi style as we get off his vehicle in the middle of a busy lane in the heat of Old Lucknow.
It is the eve of Holi and the city seems to be enjoying to the fullest. There are loudspeakers with blaring music, men and boys dancing and smearing gulaal on each other, last-minute shoppers scurrying around for clothes and sweets, and among all this commotion, us — two hungry souls looking for the perfect plate of biryani. We have come here for the famous Tundey Kebabi, but decide to give Shakeel a shot; after all, he has solid recommendation backing him.
Shakeel turns out to be a hole in the wall in a lane so narrow that two people cannot walk through it together — it is also possible though that the crowd in front of the shop prevents people from passing by. We soon join this crowd. Bent over an oversized deg , Shakeel, who is dishing out potion after potion, soon hands us a heaped plate of saffron and white rice over which he carefully places boneless pieces of chicken. As we settle on a flimsy bench and dig into the oily rice, we realise the rickshaw puller was right: the biryani here can give any other biryani in town a run for its money.
