This restaurant closed on 30 June 2020. Thanks for the memories!
Pioneers of East Indian roti and still the best
Gandhi is one of the first restaurants to serve East Indian roti in Toronto (and also the world). The East Indian roti might even have been invented here in the 1990s.
From India to the Caribbean to India to Toronto
A bit of terminology. East India refers to India, the country, as opposed to the West Indies in the Caribbean. Roti is a generic Indian term for bread but here it refers to the version in Trinidad, Guyana, and the windward islands. The life of a roti starts with a bread dough made up of maida (wheat flour). Then, ground dhal (split peas) are filled in the dough and the dough is rolled out to a thin disc. The result is a flatbread with a layer of dhal crumbs sandwiched in the middle. The semi-hard dhal doesn’t add much flavour but it provides textural contrast to the soft bread. This flatbread is known as dhalpuri roti and is a Trinidadian creation.
When people talk about West Indian roti, they usually mean a meal involving the flatbread and not the flatbread itself. Take a dhalpuri roti, put your choice of curry, meat, potatoes, and vegetables in the middle, and then fold it up into a rectangular parcel. Lightly toast it on a tawa (hotplate) and you get a West Indian roti. The fillings are usually Caribbean entrées like chicken curry and goat curry.
Gandhi takes the concept of a West Indian roti and uses traditional Indian fillings. The most popular filling here is butter chicken but you can also find other North Indian curries like jalfrezi, vindaloo, and korma. Another departure from the West Indian roti is that they use a chapati instead of a dhalpuri roti. It’s mostly the same thing except the chapati doesn’t have dhal and is much thinner.
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