We started off the year suddenly surrounded by new Indian food trucks and last night we met a new one hanging out on Hollywood Blvd. Bollywood Bites is serving authentic, rich Indian cuisine to the masses, with everything from restaurant standards like chicken tikka masala, fish masala, saag paneer, chana, and biryani to Chowpatty Beach-style fare like pani puri, sev puri, and yes, (finally) Mumbai’s true street food staple “sandwich”: vada pav, though here it’s called Bombay batta bada, as well as Delhi-style keema pav. There’s refreshingly little fusion on the truck, even if kathi rolls are described as “Punjabi burritos” and you can get tandoori chicken on a salad. So, who’s the truck’s ubiquitous owner and where do you find it?
Bollywood Bites springs from the catering company of the same name run by Sanjay Patel, a former Four Seasons sous chef well-known in the Hollywood social scene and a chef popular with Hollywood stars for his Indian cooking and aryuvedic expertise. He was a longtime chef to The Jackson family and has the photos to prove it. In fact, check out this guy’s website and truck and you’ll see tons of photos of him standing alongside Michael Jackson, Al Gore, Aishwarya Rai, Paris Hilton, Shahrukh Khan, and Mr. Lionel Richie. So yeah, both real actual Hollywood and Bollywood stars.
Patel’s truck is usually found daily at the office-park-adjacent food truck zone in Santa Monica for lunch and he plans to bring another truck to Camarillo to serve the workforces there. Here’s hoping he starts Twittering a little more in the coming weeks so we can more easily track his sumptuous, authentic Indian eats as they cut a path through L.A.
