Tadka Boom!

The fresh and fun folks at Tadka Boom! have put Indian on the breakfast table.

Indian for breakfast? Maybe leftover curry, lazily (and greasily) consumed out of hung-over necessity, but generally this particular cuisine doesn’t come to mind in the early hours. It is actually a crying shame and misconception – one that Tadka Boom! have made it their business to change with a modern, healthy take on traditional Indian street food.

And not a butter chicken or rogan josh in sight.

“There’s so much more breadth and depth to Indian food than that,” says Lalitha Rajan (affectionately Mama Rajan), the chef behind the Goldsbrough Lane eatery, who, after seven months experimenting over a stove, has fashioned a roti that rolls.

Fill with ginger-chilli prawns, Tik Tikka Boom chicken or 15-spice-slathered, slow-cooked lamb and you have yourself a speedy lunch wrap – one that won’t stink out the office. “The menu has been designed to develop the different flavours of the spices themselves,” Mama Rajan says, with an emphasis on subtlety. It’s a fusion of Southern and Northern India, brought to life with fresh Australian produce. “A lot of the dishes are traditionally what used to be cooked at home.”

And at breakfast, things really get cooking. The Bada Brekki stack of lentil and rice pikelets with Indian scramble fills your tum, while the Idli Over Easy’s steamed rice cakes, with coconut and tomato chutneys, gunpowder spice and eggs leans on the lighter side.  “That would probably be the most popular breakfast item in India,” muses Mama Rajan – the thousand-year old rice cakes arguably the third or fourth most eaten breakfast in the world. “But nobody outside India knows what it is!”

There’s no going past Grandma’s Jau Porridge – a blend of hand-cracked barley and cardamom-infused milk, raspberry compote and toasted almonds, with the sweet additional option of poached pear. And what’s breakfast without coffee? South-Indian drip coffee at that – on the stronger side for those caffeine-craving city slickers. Cheeky snacks (be they Bombay Bites or Tadka Slider) round out the daytime menu, not forgetting a sneaky scoop of ‘Spice Cream’ to finish.

NOTE: Breakfast is temporarily unavailable, but lunch will be served from 10:30am-3pm.

Tadka Boom!
TG22 Goldsbrough Lane, 550 Bourke Street, Melbourne
Mon – Fri 10:30am – 3:00pm
tadkaboom.com.au