The original menu was a single dish — aloo kulcha with lightly spiced chole and sirke-wali-pyaaz, chopped. The chole was made without oil, ghee, onion, tomato, garlic or ginger, seasoned instead with a special Amritsari masala and light spices. (Express Photo by Akash Patil)In Chembur Camp — named for the Sindhi families who settled here after Partition and brought their food with them — there is a dhaba that has been making one thing since 1972. No frills, no reinvention. Just kulcha, Amritsari-style, off a tandoor.We are talking about Sainath Dhaba, which has been a fixture in Chembur for more than 50 years, longer if you count the years before the licence came through in 1978.The founder Janak Raj Mehra brought a handcart from Amritsar sometime around 1972 or 1973, initially settling in Khar before bringing his family along and making Chembur , and started offering one dish: aloo kulcha with lightly spiced chole and sirke-wali-pyaaz, chopped. The chole was made without oil, ghee, onion, tomato, garlic or ginger — seasoned instead with a special Amritsari masala and light spices. That was the only thing on the menu. There was no plan to expand it. There was barely a plan at all — just a handcart, a tandoor and a recipe from his birthplace, Amritsar.“When my father started, a kulcha was priced at Rs 1 to Rs 1.50,” said Vijay Mehra, who joined the business around 1989 to 1990 when it was Rs 3. Today aloo kulcha is Rs 90. The paneer kulcha came later. “It came after 1985, when Gujarati customers started coming in… Initially they assumed the tandoor was used only for non-vegetarian cooking but once they tried it and liked it, the menu grew.” Today, the menu has ten variants of kulchas, aloo, aloo cheese, gobhi (cauliflower), gobhi cheese, paneer, paneer cheese, aloo pyaaz, aloo pyaaz cheese, mix veg and mix veg cheese. The eleventh variant is in works but if will come only when Vijay is cent per cent sure. “I once thought of making a Chinese style paratha,” he shares, but I am not yet content with it. Vijay Mehra, whose father started Sainath Dhaba, making aloo kulcha. (Express Photo by Akash Patil)The dhaba’s connection to Bollywood is not incidental. Chembur was, for decades, a film country. RK Studios sat at its heart and Basant Studio, which became Basant Vihar Society, was just around the corner. Sainath Dhaba was the kulcha stop for both. Vijay and his father used to set up live counters at RK Studios, making kulcha and chole on-site for the stars and key crew.“Punjabi celebrities in particular liked our kulchas,” he said. Live counter setups would take an hour to two hours to get going. From those early connections at the studios, the network grew through word of mouth. “Many celebrities used to invite us once they had eaten our food at one place and liked it.” The dhaba has catered at B.R. Chopra’s bungalow, and set up a counter at Malaika Arora’s residence at Mecca Tower in Chembur, where Salman Khan’s family and friend circle were among the guests.The photographs from all of these occasions line the walls featuring Sohail Khan, Arbaaz Khan and many others. What is on display is a fraction of what exists, he says, adding, “There are full albums at home. If we put everything up, it would cover the entire wall.”Story continues below this ad Sainath Dhaba started as a handcart. Founder Janak Raj Mehra brought it from Amritsar, initially setting up in Khar before moving his family to Chembur and putting down roots. (Express Photo by Akash Patil)The golden period, by the owner’s reckoning, was 2003 to 2004, when a newspaper ran a feature and the city discovered what Chembur already knew.“We did not have mobile phones then, only a landline. When we were told the article was coming out, we prepared stock three times our usual quantity.” It was not enough. The phones rang without stopping, the queues stretched beyond what the space could hold and by the end of the day the team was exhausted. “That was the first time we understood what press coverage could do.”Today, on weekdays, the dhaba makes around 100 to 150 kulchas. On weekends, 200 to 250. The busiest stretch is post-monsoon, August to February, when the city is outside and hungry and the nights are cool enough to stand at a tandoor.The handcart from Amritsar is long gone. But the kulcha is the same. And, the chole still has no oil.Heena Khandelwal is a Special Correspondent with The Indian Express, Mumbai. She covers a wide range of subjects from relationship and gender to theatre and food. To get in touch, write to heena.khandelwal@expressindia.com ... Read MoreClick here to join Express Pune WhatsApp channel and get a curated list of our stories© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd