As children growing up in India, Pradyut Bansal and his cousins would anxiously watch out the window of their grandparents’ apartment in Calcutta, waiting for their favorite street vendors to set up on the corner below around 4 p.m. Then they’d grab whatever pocket change they could find and go eat as many puchkas – a type of Indian street food – as they could stomach.
Sometimes that was a lot. Puchkas are bite-sized pieces of crispy dough shells shaped into tiny bowls and then filled with black chickpeas, potatoes and a spiced, herbaceous broth.
Bansal and his cousins would challenge each other during the summer to see who could eat the most. Legend has it that the record was over 100 in one sitting.
“That is why I have such nostalgia for them. They invoke a feeling of shared love and comfort,” he said. “Those experiences shaped my flavor profile and palate.”
It’s the profile Bansal was chasing when he opened Chaatwala, a farmers market food stand, in 2023. He now operates almost every weekend from May through October at the City Park Farmers Market on Saturdays and at the Highlands Farmers Market on Sundays. In between, he pops up at as many other restaurants and venues as he can.
That taste of home is also why Bansal expanded Chaatwala to include other Indian street foods, like kati rolls made from flaky paratha bread, and dosas — thin, griddle-cooked flatbreads made from fermented rice and lentil batter.
But it’s the experience of ordering and eating puchkas – a treat that Bansal only offers once a month or so – that stands out at Chaatwala.
One order consists of six puchkas ($13) served one at a time to each customer based on their taste preferences. On most days, Bansal and his staff have two standard broths: a tangy tamarind one with a touch of sweetness, and a spicy, herby one with a mint and green chili base, cilantro and cumin. They often add a third, seasonal broth, like peach and ghost peppers.
When a customer places an order, the staff member fills and hands over one puchka at a time; customers can try just one broth, all of them, or even combine them into new flavor combinations.
“That’s how I grew up eating it, and I wanted to re-create that experience,” Bansal said, adding that in most cases, “it’s so easy to get your food and walk away. With this, it’s not that intuitive, and there is a level of interaction and slowing down, not just gobble, gobble and leave.”
Bansal said 95% of his ingredients are made from scratch, including the shells, which are made through a labor-intensive process; he makes 300 to 400 shells at a time. “That’s why I only do them once a month. But it is something I take a lot of pride in.”
Puchkas are known by other names – like pani puri or golgappa in other parts of India and on other menus at Denver restaurants – and have different ingredients, depending on where in India they are sold. But they are a relatively niche dish, so Bansal said he enjoys the educational component of serving them.
“When we started selling chat, we had to explain it to 80% of our customers. Now, it is just 20%. That is a fun feeling,” he said. And those customers keep coming back. Bansal estimates that 75% of his business is returning customers on a week-to-week basis.
A few years ago, Bansal returned to India to visit family, and while he was in Calcutta, he went back to the same street corner he frequented as a boy and found the same vendor selling the same puchkas.
“Same guy, same corner for 15 years,” he said. So, to go back and be able to taste it and say, ‘Yes, this is the flavor I remember,’ and to see that mine don’t taste that far from his,” was very validating.
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Dining and Cooking