Could the Arabic Mandi be Hyderabad's New Favourite Dish?
Mandi is steadily carving out a place on Hyderabad’s culinary map, winning over palates and hearts alike. But how did this fragrant rice-and-meat delicacy make its way here? Swati Sucharita delves into its rising popularity and cultural journey.
It would be considered almost sacrilege to talk about Hyderabadi cuisine without first referring to kacchi gosht ki biryani.
But these days, the biryani-obsessed metro is slowly but surely making space for new food favourites, albeit borrowed from other cultures. One of these is the popular Arabian dish, mandi.
Recently, the culinary world was captivated by images of former MasterChef Australia judges—Matt Preston, George Calombaris, and Gary Mehigan—savoruing mandi at a Hyderabad restaurant with the unforgettable name, Kiss Me Mandi! Their feast also included local favorites like Chicken 65. (Though when it comes to unusual mandi restaurant names, Girlfriend Mandi undoubtedly takes the crown!)
What is mandi and how is it different from Hyderabadi biryani?
“Mandi and biryani are both one pot meals of rice and meat, and the similarity ends there,” explains home chef, Fatima Saiyyed. Mandi is prepared by first slow-cooking the lamb in a spiced broth. Once the meat is tender and set aside, rice is then cooked in the same flavourful broth, infused with spices such as peppercorns, cinnamon, cumin, coriander seeds, saffron, and cardamom. The cooked rice is then topped with the lamb —though in Saudi Arabia, camel meat and beef are also used—and garnished with raisins, almonds, and pistachios. In some variations, the meat is placed on a rack above the rice as it cooks in a coal-fired pit—a traditional method known as madfoon.
“In Hyderabadi biryani, semi-cooked rice and marinated mutton are cooked together with spices on dum or steam,” says Fatima, explaining the difference in technique. The game-changer is the lamb broth in mandi, and dried black lemon, which add a distinct sweet-tart flavour, which is absent in biryani. Originally from Hyderabad, Fatima relocated to Riyadh after her marriage. Back in the city now, she is cooking both Hyderabadi and Arabic specialities out of home.
In mandi, the rice is cooked in a spiced meat broth and then topped with grilled meats. Credit: Aazebo
My first experience of mandi was thanks to Fatima, who curated an authentic Arabic mandi feast for a Sunday brunch at a five-star hotel. There was a humongous degchi of mandi: fragrant saffron-hued basmati rice redolent with grilled meat, nuts, pistachios and raisins and paired with a green chilli, garlic and coriander relish. I was impressed by the light, subtle and aromatic flavours of the dish.
Mandi is not an unfamiliar concept to Hyderabad. The dish has been a culinary offering in the Old City suburbs of Barkas, a military outpost dating from the Nizam’s time. Barkas is considered a corruption of the word barracks, as this area was the old military barracks of the Nizam of Hyderabad, who would bring in ‘chaush’ from Yemen to work in his army. Chaush, is an Ottoman Turkish word which means a soldier of junior military rank, indicating the predominance of soldiers and mercenaries from the early Hadrami migration to Hyderabad in the 18th and 19th centuries, from Hadramawt valley in South Yemen.
People living in newer parts of Hyderabad often go to Barkas to eat mandi. “Barkas is not really within the city so we often plan a mandi meal, occasionally for a weekend family lunch or maybe a late weeknight dinner. The eateries in Barkas do not offer any of the fine-dining amenities that urban diners are used to,” says Syed Waris Ali.
Syed and his brothers, Akbar and Mohammad, grew up in Riyadh and are no strangers to mandi. Their longing for a ‘mandi fix’ drove them to open the restaurant, Mandi 36, in Jubilee Hills, in 2017. It was one of the earliest restaurants exclusively focussed on mandi . They have since branched out to Banjara Hills and Gachibowli, and sell about 100 kilos of mandi daily, at each outlet. “Mandi is here to stay, but it hasn’t reached biryani’s cult status yet,” remarks Akbar.
“Biryani is every Hyderabadi’s first love, and mandi can best be described as a close second,” says Mohammad Ayub, the founder and owner of Aazebo, one of the major mandi players in Hyderabad. He launched Aazebo in 2017, and it has four outlets in the city.
These modern mandi restaurants share a few common elements—the ambience leans towards fine dining, featuring carpeted floors, low seating with bolsters, and food served on traditional Arabic copper plates. The decor features antique copper urns and plates, and artworks that depict the desert landscape and camels.
In Hyderabad, mandi is usually served with a tangy tomato, green chilli, and parsley dip, and jugs of Saudi champagne, made from infused citrus fruit. The popular mandi offerings here include mutton zurbiyan mandi, mutton fry mandi, and mutton or chicken Al Faham (grilled in Arabian spices) mandi. Some versions are tweaked to appeal to local tastes, like the chicken BBQ tikka mandi or the mutton marag mandi.
Haneeth Mutton Mandi. Credit: Kholani’s Mandi
How close is the Hyderabadi mandi to the original Arabian recipe?
Mohsin Kholani, the founder-owner of Kholani’s Mandi, is from Yemen and lived the first 25 years of his life in Barkas. He claims to be the only one offering ‘authentic’ Yemeni mandi. He has the background to prove it — his grandfather moved from Yemen to be part of the Nizam’s military bodyguards, and Mohsin has seen people cook mandi in a wood-fired pit at his village Kholna in Yemen. “We import the spices and dried black lemons from Dubai,” says Mohsin. Their mandi does have some tweaks — Basmati rice in place of parboiled, short grain Yemeni rice, as the latter wasn’t appreciated by local customers; as well as an increase in the spice quotient. Kholani’s signature dish is the haneeth mutton mandi, a beloved Yemeni speciality. Made with rib or shoulder cuts of lamb, the meat is marinated in a fragrant spice blend with yoghurt and slow-roasted until it reaches fall-off-the-bone tenderness.
At Aazebo, Mohammed offers a mutton mafdoon mandi over the weekend, which is when their more discerning diners choose to dine. “There is a market for all kinds of mandi. The Al Faham chicken mandi is our most popular offering as more and more people tend to choose chicken.”
The market is undoubtedly responding to the rising demand for mandi. Even traditional biryani and haleem strongholds like Shah Ghouse and Pista House have embraced the trend, adding mandi to their menus. Pista House has gone a step further, introducing a dedicated dining section for Arabian mandi at its fine dining restaurant in Gachibowli.
Basith Ali, a keen gourmand who believes the best mandi is to be found in Dubai and the Emirates, partakes in a ‘weekend mandi fix’ at least once a month. “It is light, both on the stomach and pocket, and can be shared between four people. These days, most establishments offer an assortment of meats like chicken 65, grilled mutton, and fish and prawns too, besides other accompaniments like mutton soup, garlic mayo and the traditional tomato chutney. We are sorted on both our carb and protein needs.”
While he acknowledges that Hyderabad has yet to match the finesse and authenticity of mandi from Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, he believes its popularity is steadily growing — but it still has a long way to go before rivalling the city’s ultimate culinary icon—the Hyderabadi biryani.
Swati Sucharita has been mapping news as a print (and now a digital media) journalist, and while she began with the drab world of business news almost three decades ago, now writes on all matters food and drink, and has recently also written for The Bloomsbury Handbook of Indian Cuisine.
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