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It is Sunday morning and I want to fly 1,907 km away just for breakfast.

At 8 am, it is too early for the Indian restaurants in Beijing to open. But as I write this, Indians are walking into a restaurant to order the typical Maharashtrian fare of poha, upma and the sweet semolina pudding called shira. In China! Some of them will eat vada pav (spicy potato cutlet in a bun). In China!

This week in hilly Yiwu, a three-hour drive from Shanghai, I walked down the city’s north street that is prized real estate because it is located opposite the world’s largest market. The street is flanked by six-lane boulevards plus bicycle lanes, wide pavements and trees everywhere. But I felt like I was on a reporting assignment in India’s Nagpur or Nashik. The street is lined with at least seven Indian restaurants and two Indian grocery stores (selling Bollywood DVDs!) all in a row.

Yiwu earned its riches in atheist China by supplying the world with idols of gods and everything else from buttons, socks, needles and zips to machine parts. Look around your house, there will be something from Yiwu.

More Indians travel to little Yiwu than to Beijing and Shanghai. And clearly the traders from Maharashtra, Gujarat and Rajasthan outnumber those from other states because Yiwu’s restaurants serve all the food you cannot find in China’s boomtowns. From 8 am to 3 am. Their counterparts in Beijing shut shop at 11 pm and some take an afternoon break as well.

The oldest restaurant, Swad-e-Hindustan has a separate vegetarian kitchen, a concept unheard of in Beijing. Khana Khazana serves only vegetarian fare and no alcohol. “We even make Jain food, no ginger, no garlic, no onion…’’ said the owner Prakash Manglani, as I stared in astonishment at the menu which included India’s standard canteen fare: misal pav, usal pav, even bread-butter-jam. To make vada pav they bake their own bread. Another restaurant served samosa pav but it wasn’t the same with a fried sesame bun on the side.

Girish Haryani and father Ghansham brought 300 Indian dishes to Yiwu with the city's first Indian restaurant. Photo by: Reshma Patil

I discovered what could be the best Indian food in China, as I scanned the 300 dishes at Swad-e-Hindustan. The two-storey establishment is owned by a low-profile father and son duo — Ghansham and Girish Haryani — who hail from Ulhasnagar on Mumbai’s fringe. In 2003, they were the first to see the business opportunity for an Indian eatery in Yiwu while its international market was still being built and modernised. Actually, the Chinese have not stopped expanding the market. It is still being built.

When Girish, 29, reaches his restaurant, he enters after saying a long prayer on the street. Then he prays again by the Ganesha on his office desk. (Girish’s Ganesha is not Made-in-China). If an elderly Indian customer walks in, he bends to touch his feet. He knows almost everyone by name.

Inside this restaurant, surrounded by walls lined with Indian art painted by Chinese artisans from Shanghai, I ate dosa and idli with two chutneys while the 1990s Hindi serial Vikram Aur Vetal played on the television set. I forgot I was in China.

After a year of living in Beijing on limited Indian food that costs more than twice as much and often tastes like nothing familiar, I wanted to pack the Haryani’s 300-item plastic green menu as a souvenir. There were pages listing nearly every Indian 5 pm snack. To serve the quintessential vada pav, they use sliced French bread. For half the price of two samosas in Beijing, they give you four super-size samosas.

I broke a one-year gap to eat the ‘Indian-Chinese’ food that I used to order at 10 pm in HT’s Mumbai newsroom: paneer chilly and spicy Schezwan rice. It was what I wanted, like the takeaway from Mumbai and nothing like the genuine Chinese food served on the mainland.

After dinner, I walked over to a menu displayed outside a competing eatery. What is Paneer Taka Tak and Veg. Miloni?

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