Places like these make it difficult to generalize about South Indian restaurants: No matter what they look like, appearances are deceiving. Except when they aren’t. It strikes us that we’ve rarely eaten a poor meal at one of the ubiquitous vegetarian idly-dosa restaurants and that many of them offer such creature comforts as menus, light, and air. Madurai’s Arya Bhavan and Modern Restaurant are fine examples, as is the giant Woodlands Drive-In Restaurant in Chennai—pleasant to sit in, with genuinely good, local food. Maybe food travelers should stick to comfortable places like these. Yet, if they did, they’d miss out on an eye-opening variety of regional dishes. Food lovers who really want to experience the South will have to take their chances with grunge, we decide. And they should. Why schlepp to India if not to try street-corner mutton dosa?
As we’re about to leave India, we learn one last truth about the food here—few restaurants, charming or dingy, can equal South India’s best home cooking. We make this discovery the day Pritham Chakravarthy invites us to lunch. A graduate student, Chakravarthy lives with her husband and two daughters in a simple flat, and she greets us at the door with stalks of sugarcane. While we chew away at the juicy, sweet pulp, she darts around her tiny kitchen making white pumpkin in an aromatic paste with homemade yogurt, beef in a green masala, and a rasam so bright and delicate we can taste each spice. Sitting together in a circle on the living room floor, we eat the meal, each dish made vivid with Chakravarthy’s skill and ardor, not to mention her homemade spice mixes. The meal evokes the coconut palms, the rice fields, the tamarinds and chiles and curry leaves of the land that surrounds us.
Throughout this journey, we’ve asked ourselves if food travels, if these wonderful dishes will taste the same in San Francisco or New York. After the intense, passionately local cooking we’ve been offered at Chakravarthy’s, we know the answer. Great cooking tastes of its environment, and in South India that taste is generous and an invitation to return.
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