After a long delay following the 2020 tornado and pandemic, Gully Boyz has finally opened for business in the former location of Fat Bottom Brewing Co. at 900 Main St. next to Butcher & Bee. The restaurant’s name refers to a term of endearment between fans of hip-hop culture in the South Asian subcontinent of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. It's a phrase made famous by the 2019 Zoya Akhtar film Gully Boy.
Gully Boyz is a partnership between restaurateurs Arjun Meherish and Qasim Farid — the former a native of India and the latter a Pakastani — and the restaurant represents a combination of their two family food cultures. While many of the ingredients and flavors of the two cuisines are similar, each heritage is represented throughout the menu of build-your-own bowls and kathi rolls, kind of a South Asian burrito with a whole wheat chapati flatbread subbing for a tortilla.
In fact, the entire experience is kind of like visiting a Chipotle, if Chipotle were more interesting. The building is decorated with vibrant murals depicting different aspects of the co-owners' cultures, including a striking split painting of Q’s (Qasim's) and AJ’s (Arjun’s) mothers, one depicted in bright colors with glittering earrings and the other in subtler tones wearing a Muslim headscarf.
Their mamas should be proud of what they have created in the industrial-chic space, a fast-casual restaurant that features family recipes that are still quite approachable to neophytes. There are a lot of choices to make when faced with the menu, but workers behind the counters are happy to explain the flavors and background to the ingredients offered.
First, choose between a bowl or a kathi and then a base from mixed greens, turmeric rice, masala rice, regular naan or garlic naan. If the world “masala” is one of the only things you recognize on the menu — yes you can default to a chicken tikka masala that is quite good, but I encourage you to look deeper.
Protein choices include halal lamb or chicken thighs, paneer or chick peas, and you can opt for a half-n-half if you can’t make up your mind. Next, select from four curries: the tomato cream tikka masala, a spinach cream saag, vegan nihari broth or a spicy tomato and onion kadai curry. Next, pick your toppings from chopped tomatoes, whole kernel corn, piquant green chiles, fried shallots and cilantro.
While adding a sauce to a curry may seem like overkill, and according to AJ, isn’t the norm in his homeland, we Americans love our sauces, and they’ll be happy to serve it on the side if you don’t want to muddle the flavors. Mint and savory yogurt raita are excellent with the lamb, while mango habanero packs a nice building burn. Other options include a tamarind sauce and the proprietary Gully Boyz Spicy and Gully Boyz Sweet. Kathi rolls offer essentially the same options, so why not try both?
Side dishes include some delicious spiced lentils, beets with paneer, a chickpea stew and a crispy potato samosa bomb. Try to save room for an order of decadent milk or white-chocolate-dipped galub jamun, honey syrup and milk dough balls. Gully Boyz also create and bottle their own beverages, which are available to go if you’d prefer. The standard mango lassi yogurt smoothie is practically a dessert, as is the falooda Indian bubble smoothie. More subtle are a delicious herbal rose sherbet and nimbu paani, a lemon beverage that might be the original sports drink used to replace electrolytes in the extreme heat and humidity of the subcontinent.
Service is fast and efficient, and it should be no problem to get in and out with a great meal before your one-hour free parking in the lot behind the building expires. Q and AJ are the sort of business owners you can really root for — an alliance between two cultures that don’t have a recent history of cooperation and collaboration. Drop by any day of the week from 11 a.m. until 9 p.m. to welcome them to the neighborhood, and reward yourself with some really interesting food! They also expect to do a big carryout and delivery business, so don’t forget about these options.
