VISITORS tapping into Mumbai’s diverse food scene are often distracted by the plethora of newly opened, wallet-busting foreign restaurants that now steal much of the culinary limelight. But for those searching for authentic Indian dining experiences, a quick look beyond the restaurant pages leads to other, more creative experiences.

Open to outsiders, as well as Mumbaikars, Gypsy Kitchen offers home cooking from Mumbai housewives who are keen to showcase their heirloom recipes. Fans follow Gypsy Kitchen’s FaceBook page and get alerts for pop-up events at local homes, where, for around 2,000 rupees (GBP20) paid to the host, they eat distinctive, home-cooked meals.

I give the concept a go on a warm, starlit evening. Tonight’s chef is Zia Basrai, who lives in a sixth-floor flat in the leafy south Mumbai suburb of Bandra. There I join chef Gresham Fernandes, chef and founder of Gypsy Kitchen, and Ayaz Basrai, Zia’s son. We sit cross-legged on her floor while Zia, dressed in a red shalwar kameez, is busy in the kitchen cooking recipes handed down from her Gujarati ancestors. She is a Bohra Muslim and her recipes have been passed down through the female line. This cuisine is impossible to find in Mumbai restaurants.

Scents of cardamom, rose and rice fill the sitting room. As we wait for the first dish, we sip from stainless steel cups filled to the brim with salty, sweet buttermilk mixed with fenugreek seeds and water. Zia motions for us to put a pinch of salt on our tongues as a palate cleanser. Then the meal begins.

First is Zia’s special sutarfeni. This is a crunchy bird’s nest of dried noodles topped with rich cream, rose petals, pistachios, almonds and cardamom. It is warm, scented, sweet, rich and crispy all at once and we eat it greedily with our hands. Gresham still has sticky sutarfeni strands around his lips when he tells me that it was the loss of one of his favourite childhood meals that first sparked the idea for the Gypsy Kitchen.

“My Catholic grandmother used to make something she called cutting-curry,” he says. “It was amazing, but she died and never wrote it down, so now the recipe is forgotten. Unless someone preserves these recipes from Bombay’s communities, they will disappear forever.”

The cooks are happy to share their recipes with Gresham. He is wildly enthusiastic about food, and is successful, too, having recently returned from a residential stint at Copenhagen’s Noma restaurant, voted the world’s best once again in 2014. He often cooks alongside the women, taking copious notes. The plan, he tells me, is to one day scale the project out to other cities and to record the recipes in books and films.

Around us, bowls of coconut, aubergine and poppy-seed curry are placed next to potato, green onion and green garlic stew. Between mouthfuls, Gresham tells me that Gypsy Kitchen is all about the cooks. “It’s fun, not philanthropy. We don’t have a set way of doing things; it’s an organic process”

The evening is like an enjoyable, low-key dinner round at your aunt’s. In a way, it is a simple reaction against the big-spending culture of money-mad Mumbai but it is also much more than that. The money helps some poorer cooks. “One housewife monsoon-proofed her home with the money she made,” Gresham says.

In fact, Gypsy Kitchen has proved so popular that, in a couple of months, the team will open a permanent Gypsy Kitchen venue in a disused bakery here in Bandra. The women will cook at home but the food will be presented at the restaurant, with images of the inside of their homes projected onto the walls. Such technology and innovation may be new to Mumbai, but food journalist Roshni Bajaj tells me that, for the millions who keep a closer eye on their rupees, there has always been community dining in the city.

Before I leave Mumbai, Bajaj takes me to an old-school community dining venue: the Friends Union Joshi Club in the jewellery district of Kalbadevi. The restaurant is caught in a time warp, reached by ascending grubby stairs. Inside, steel thali plates balance on formica tables.

Yogesh Purohit, whose family have served local workers for 80 years, seats us. Yogesh caters for travelling salesmen who have come to Mumbai from states further north, specifically Rajasthan and Gujarat. He feeds 200 or so of them every lunchtime. They’re served only the food he and they know: Rajasthani and Gujarati curries.

We are quickly served the same: on a thali, six small dishes of kidney-bean curry, spiced ridge gourd, tamarind chutney, tangy yogurt curry, coriander chilli chutney, daal and four different types of roti.

A thin, middle-aged man leans across from a neighbouring table, eager to tell us his story. Travelling by train regularly from Rajasthan to do business in the nearby medicine bazaar, the salesman eats Yogesh’s food twice a day. “It’s comforting coming here,” he says. “Nothing changes. It’s just good service and good honest food.”

In fast-paced Mumbai, I can see there is some reassurance in that.—By arrangement with the Guardian