In front of the Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad, India, is an ordinary-looking bakery selling cakes, bread and biscuits.
It’s easy to miss: all around is the bustling Laad Bazaar, with locals selling everything from cheap bangles and strips of gum to piles of pomegranates. The air hums with the call to prayer. Scooters purr around the 16th-century Charminar – a monument built by the architect of Hyderabad, Mohammed Quli Qutb Shah.
Life inside Nimrah bakery is no less energetic. From 4am to around midnight its fierce following of Hyderabadis is haggling over the counter for the hot-from-the-oven osmania biscuits – buttery cookies, sometimes with coconut, just 2p each – and soupy cups of Irani chai, the latter a local speciality that was imported from Iran centuries ago. They slide into wooden booths to eat, or buy boxes of hot cookies to take home. Owner Aslam, whose father set up Nimrah in 1993, shifts 7,000 cups of chai a day, alongside 4,000 cookies to dunk in it – it’s serious business.
Hyderabad is better known for another food export: biryani. The small osmania biscuits haven’t had quite the same marketing, even though they’re available all over town. (Nimrah’s are so good, Aslam tells me, that Mumbaikers order trayfuls of them and get them bussed back.)
There are two versions of the story of where the biscuit originated. The first: they were named after the last Nizam of Hyderabad, Mir Osman Ali Khan, who wanted a biscuit that was both sweet and salty. The second: they escaped from a dietician’s menu at Osmania hospital. Patients (and visitors) loved the cookie so much that bakers around the city started making their own and serving them with Irani chai. I prefer the second version.
