CHENNAI : The right alley adjacent to Masjid Hafiz Ahmed Khan Mosque is lined with food shops. Amid this is a small one-room shop with a red board and people milling around it. I look up; the name Haleemwala shines in bold white letters. For 13 years, the shop has been enticing its patrons with piping hot haleem that usually gets sold out in microseconds.
The meat menu
Muneer Basha, the owner, welcomes me with a smile and a bunch of parcel packets in his hands. He gestures that he will talk to me in a few minutes after serving food. By the time he arrives, I make a note of the sumptuous menu on the beige-hued wall. Beef curry, shami (both mutton and chicken), chicken roll, mutton haleem, chicken haleem, beef 65, chicken 65, chicken lollipop, chicken liver, beef pakoda, chicken cutlet and egg sweet... are you drooling already? “The preparation starts at 9 am. Almost everything is sold by the time the shop closes at 11 pm,” shares Muneer, adding that on an average, almost 35 kg of meat is sold on a daily basis. Before starting the shop, Muneer was a chef in Saudi Arabia. After he decided to move back to India, he found the streets of Triplicane to be the perfect place for this set-up, as there are a lot of biryani shops nearby.
Over the years, the footfall has increased and the menu expanded from haleem to almost all the simple meat snacks. Even though the pandemic was a bit of a downfall for the shop like any other business in the city, they have revived it now, and have customers coming in from far-off neighbourhoods too. “There are regular customers from Pallavaram, ECR and Parry’s street. I stick to our masala and recipes without opting for any ingredients like ajinomoto. Everything is prepared at our home with simple methods. The items to be fried are half-cooked from home and brought to the shop to be served piping hot,” he says, as his uncle Muhammad Shabeer and a staff member take a large vessel of frozen samosas to fry. As soon as there is a break from the customer inflow, the staff cleans the shop and arranges the chairs to welcome the next set of clients.
The highlight of their shop — the mutton haleem — is cooked for six hours with lentils, dal and mutton. Dried onions are sprinkled on the top. One bowl is a wholesome nutritious meal, we are told. “The biryani masala used in the haleem makes a difference to it and since the masalas are also homemade, the whole dish becomes a sort of comfort food,” says Muneer. The shami kebabs were succulent and flavourful, with a slight kick of heat that lingered in my mouth. The next dish on my plate, a soft and crunchy chicken roll was again a simple snack with onion and tender chicken filling.
A spoon of the beef tava curry or roast which was dripping in oil called for a flaky Malabar parotta but the soft wheat chappathis at the shop, the only option, balanced the richness. In between the quick bites, I see the usual customers ordering their regulars and concluding their meal with an egg-based sweet. “The egg sweet made from egg, milk and sugar is the only dessert we have at our shop and it is in high demand,” Muneer shares. Priced at `480 per kg, the sweet was equally the favourite of kids and adults. Arafath, one of the regular customers at the shop, shared that whenever he passes through the nearby area, he surely visits Haleemwala for he cannot miss the egg sweet.
Serving quality food
During the scorching summer, being inside the shop can become difficult. Apart from the humidity, the heat from the large frying pans can also cause discomfort, but Muneer says that even such a situation doesn’t prevent people from coming in. “During the month of Ramadan, there will be no space to stand. There will always be people. During that full month, we keep our shop open from 3 pm to 11 pm,” adds Muhammad. Even though there is a lot of demand, he doesn’t sell their items on platforms like Swiggy and Zomato. He says, “They will take extra money for the food. I don’t want that. Here I am selling for the most reasonable price. ” Muneer and his team want to keep selling their special dishes in an even bigger shop. “Right now, we are making the most of the situation. We don’t know when expansion plans will happen. The only thing I can guarantee is the quality of our products and the assurance that you will keep coming back for the taste,” Muneer concludes.