Lala Masala

Gol gappe, bhel puri, vada pav — the hand-to-mouth street snacks most Indian menus file under starters — are the main event at Lala Masala, not the warm-up to it. This Hickson Avenue counter is entirely vegetarian, a fact it treats as a starting point rather than a constraint, and it builds outward from chaat the way other kitchens build outward from a curry list. For a diner in Kingston's Old Sydenham core, the practical draw is range: one order can be a fifteen-dollar build-your-own thali, or it can be a fistful of chaat eaten standing up.

The thali is the clearest read on the kitchen. The build-your-own format hands the table bread, grains, three curries, a side and a sweet in a single order — the value spine the rest of the menu is organized around. Around it runs the street-food range that gives Lala Masala its character: dahi puri for the cool, tangy, crunchy end of chaat; cholle bhature and amritsari kulcha when the meal wants the weight of a proper plate; paneer kathi rolls and pakoras for the fried, handheld middle. Paneer butter masala is the comfort anchor, richer against a paratha than against rice. And then there is the noodle burger — a spiced noodle-and-vegetable patty served in a bun, the Indo-Chinese flourish that shows this kitchen isn't precious about tradition.

What the menu says about the kitchen is that vegetarian cooking here is the whole point, not a section of it. The range is the argument: a board that moves from chaat snacks to North Indian comfort plates to a fusion burger is making the case that meat was never the thing holding a meal together. Much of it is hard to find elsewhere in town — gol gappe and vada pav are not standard quick-service fare in a university city better stocked with curry houses — and that scarcity is part of why the counter reads as a destination rather than a default. The late hours reinforce it: the kitchen runs to eleven most nights and to midnight on weekends, which makes it as much a late-table option as a lunch one.

It also bends to how people actually eat in a university town. The portable end — samosas, vegetable momos, the kathi rolls — travels well enough that takeout is less a compromise than the obvious move for a lot of orders. The fully vegetarian board, with a clear set of vegan options, makes it a low-friction pick for a mixed table, though dairy and ghee mean the safest move is to confirm a specific dish when ordering rather than assume. And the everyday plates — a thali, a curry over grains — give the place a weeknight spine underneath the snack-counter energy.

The family kitchen behind the food is the reason it lands as specific rather than generic. Head chef Raghbir Singh Chawla carries a cooking lineage that local reporting traces to a Delhi patriarch, Kundan Laal Chawla — the kind of multi-decade family grounding that separates a from-scratch kitchen from a takeout template. The Hickson Avenue location has its own short origin: the family took the building in the autumn of 2023 and opened in February 2024, and word moved quickly through the temple-adjacent blocks nearby before the wider neighbourhood caught on.

The pieces reinforce one another. The value that makes a thali an easy solo call is the same value that lets a group — a couple of thalis, a spread of chaat, a roll or two — eat well without anyone watching the bill. The street-food breadth that pulls in a traveller looking for proper chaat is the same breadth that keeps a Kingston regular from ordering the same meal twice. And underneath all of it is a kitchen cooking from a long family lineage, which is the part that keeps the format from feeling like one. The thali is the first visit; the chaat counter is the reason there's a second.