He says, ‘do you want to eat shrimp?’”
Our guide is translating the words of our taxi driver, who is sitting in the sun with us drinking toddy, the coconut “beer” of Kerala state. We’ve sought out this toddy shop because we’ve heard it has great food, and for the past half hour we’ve been devouring quarter-inch clams fried in coconut and sweet spices, a crumble of dry-scrambled eggs with tomato and chiles, fish in tamarind sauce, and a plate of (completely illegal, we later learn) egret curry. Of course we want to eat shrimp.
But instead of heading toward the kitchen shack to place an order, the driver goes to his car and brings back a plastic bag. Carefully he opens it and sets out several small containers. Inside are shrimp masala, curried peas and tomatoes, yogurt, rice, and a jar of rasam, the peppery soup whose fragrance seems the very essence of South India. It’s his lunch, packed that morning by his wife. Voracious though we habitually are, we glance at each other uneasily. Should we eat this nice man’s meal? Well…sure, if he’ll share ours. We dig in, and taste what foreigners rarely get to taste in India: food straight from the cook’s heart and hands, food with its personality intact.
The two of us—a historian and a professional cook—have come to South India on a quest for exactly this meal, though we didn’t know it when we planned the trip. Frankly, we knew almost nothing about South Indian food when we planned the trip. In New York and San Francisco, we tasted and loved a few dishes from the region—especially airy, crêpe-like dosas and the tender little rice cakes known as idlies—and found them utterly different from the North Indian curries and tandoori dishes that Americans know so well. We arrive in India certain that the South is guarding some extraordinary culinary treasures.
We’re right about that, but most of our other preconceptions are flat wrong. A previous trip to North India convinced us that some of India’s best cooking is home cooking, and that at restaurants one rule of thumb usually applies: The more inviting the restaurant, the more boring the food. Carts on the street, smoky cubbyholes with an ancient grill out front, dim and cavernous dining halls—we’re sure that these are the only places where we’ll find the real thing in South India.
Wrong. Many of the most memorable dishes we are about to taste will come from the kitchen of a luxury hotel and from restaurants so comfortable we’re sure they’ll be a dead loss. We find some of the fresh, local, traditional food we crave in suitably grungy places, but we also find that authenticity can be less than charming.
We will also discover that South Indian food is not, as we had presumed, primarily vegetarian. It has a fantastic variety of dishes that dosas and idlies don’t even begin to suggest. This isn’t one cuisine; it’s many.
We start our trip in Kovalam, simply because it’s a beach town. What better place to have jet lag? But just one lackluster hotel dosa makes us realize that lounging seaside in a delightful stupor at the Kovalam Ashok Beach Resort is going to be a waste of time. Although this famous hotel was once the pride of Kovalam, its beach is the only thing that hasn’t been allowed to deteriorate. So the next morning, we head out early, looking for an honest breakfast. Amid a cluster of ramshackle shops and food stalls, the Hotel Udaya catches our attention. Hotel, in India, often means just a bare-bones spot for a meal, which certainly sums up the Udaya. But guides and motor-rickshaw drivers are eating here, a promising sign, so we sit down in a dim room hung with aging Christmas streamers and pictures of Hindu gods. The man in charge brings us what everyone else is eating—hot, spicy, rustic food on plain metal plates. It’s a meal we will talk about for the rest of the trip.
We begin with appams, rice-flour pancakes that are spongy and thick in the center and lacy at the edges. Tearing off bits of these light cakes, we sop up soft, almost melting potatoes in a lentil-thickened sauce made smolderingly hot with fresh green chiles. We also have puttu, hefty logs of steamed rice flour with grated coconut. These are pretty dry until we mix them with a hard-boiled-egg curry, an intoxicating stew of eggs, chiles, shallots, and a typical Keralan mix of coriander, fennel, cumin, and curry leaves. Incendiary with green chiles, this curry is a perfect example of how South Indian cooks use hot peppers not just for heat but as elements in an overall balance of flavors. The men at the next table mash small, sweet bananas into the curry to mellow it.
At lunchtime, the Udaya dishes up crisp, crunchy wadas—fritters of coarsely ground lentils that are full of shallots and chiles, a greaseless cousin of falafel. Soft, chewy round breads called parottas follow, right off the griddle, and a fresh batch of potato curry. The drivers drink tap water; we have glasses of sweet, milky tea, which goes beautifully with the spicy food and, surprisingly, the steamy hot weather, too.
Just before dinnertime on our last day in Kovalam, we receive a fax from an Indian friend. Her tip: “Don’t leave town without finding a crab masala.”
Frantically, we try to locate a restaurant with crab on the menu; no luck. But after badgering the hotel desk clerks, we finally get a lead on a lobster masala at the nearby Hotel Sea Face.
Unlike the Udaya, this really is a hotel, with a candlelit restaurant on a pool deck overlooking the beach. Below us, a chef stands at an outdoor tandoor, roasting gorgeous fresh fish to order.
“Mmmm, perfect,” the historian half of us says.
“No, no, no,” counters the cook. “The tandoor is northern. What’s it doing in the South?”
We argue. Does the probable deliciousness of the fish justify a blatantly nonlocal cooking method? Then our appetizer appears—little round peanuts stir-fried with onions, chiles, tomatoes, and spices that release their fragrance as they heat up. And the lobster, rich and pungent, has been shelled, then slowly cooked in a Keralan spice paste that is sweet with palm sugar and sour with tamarind. We eat this elegant food with our fingers, Indian style, and forget about the tandoor.
Everything we’ve read about Kochi (formerly Cochin) makes us eager to get there. Capital of the spice trade for some 1,500 years, Kochi is one of the world’s great crossroads, and its food is famous for reflecting the diversity of Kerala’s cultures and kitchens. Like many tourists, we travel part of the way to Kochi by ferry, motoring slowly through the lush, peaceful backwaters of Kerala. On the way, we pass private houseboats staffed with hired chefs, but we love our perch on the roof deck of our old, rickety vessel. At midday we dock at a clearing where wooden tables are set up, a banana leaf at each place. Servers speed down the tables, spooning dollops of food on every leaf: soft Keralan rice moistened with a big spoonful of lentil purée; chile-reddened lemon pickle; white pumpkin bathed in a soothing yogurt; a hearty mix of chopped vegetables, including white beets, potatoes, and green beans made rich with coconut, shredded cabbage so piquant it’s almost a pickle, and a small, whole karimeen, a ubiquitous local fish, spice-rubbed and fried.
“More?” they keep asking. “More?”
Barely three days into the trip, we’re eating food we’d been certain didn’t exist—wonderful local food cooked expressly for tourists. Yes, we want more.
We arrive in kochi later that day and fall instantly in love. Spread out over islands and peninsulas, with its constant boat traffic and the scent of spices wafting from cool, dark alleys in the market, Kochi has been called the Venice of India. Hindus, Muslims, and Christians live amicably here, contributing their traditions to an extraordinary local food culture.
By a stroke of good fortune that we can only attribute to the Hindu deity Ganesh, remover of obstacles, we arrive in Kochi just as a team at the Taj Malabar Hotel is busy doing exactly what we’re doing: investigating the food of Kerala. In preparation for the hotel’s new Keralan restaurant, local cooks are in the kitchen demonstrating traditional dishes to the chefs while researchers visit Keralan villages, gathering recipes from housewives and filming them as they prepare meals.
At the center of it all is a talented young Taj chef named Deepak T. Das, whose memories of his mother’s Keralan cooking help him create for us some of the most dazzling food we’ve ever tasted. For breakfast, he prepares puttu, lavish with freshly grated coconut and more refined than the Udaya’s; there’s also a spicy-hot black-chickpea curry, aromatic with ginger, fennel, green chiles, and slices of fried coconut. Another morning, he offers us oroti, pancakes of rice powder, coconut, and cumin that are shaped and flattened by hand; we can see Das’s palm print on each delicate cake. At dinner, Das shows us the range of Keralan cuisine, starting with an Anglo-Indian fish moilly, chunks of fish poached in fresh coconut milk and subtly seasoned with turmeric, ginger, garlic, and sweet spices. Then, representing the centuries-old Syrian-Christian community, a spicy, dry-fried hash of beef and coconut that holds exciting layers of flavor in every bite.
Confessing that he is no expert in Kerala’s Mopplah, or Muslim, cuisine, Das arranges a lunch for us at a restaurant in the Hotel Abad. There, typical Muslim dishes are served in their southern guise, quite unlike the North Indian versions served in Indian restaurants all over America. A sumptuous creamy mutton curry, delicately infused with cardamom and black pepper, is dotted with roasted local cashews. We pour fresh coconut milk over it and use paper-thin rice crêpes to pick up chunks of the tender meat. A beautifully molded chicken biryani is laced with cardamom, cloves, and cinnamon, its aroma evoking the city’s spice market.
In Kochi we notice for the first time that our favorite guideline for identifying great restaurants in South India—grunge rules—is not infallible. It falters at a place we come to think of as The Cart with No Name, a street-corner operation we had heard about and were longing to try. In a Dickensian cloud of heat and smoke, one cook towers over a propane-fired grill turning out dosas, parottas, and eggs, while another cook handles the fried fish and chicken. Hordes of hungry men wait at long tables. It seems like everything we’d hoped for ... until the food arrives. Apart from a great dish of fried sardines, nothing is remarkable, especially when compared with our dinner at a modern, thoroughly appealing Kochi restaurant called Four Foods, where businesspeople and families go for home-style duck curry and shrimp masala.
On our last day in Kochi, when an afternoon stroll lands us smack in the middle of 21 gorgeously bedecked elephants, three marching bands, and a Kathakali dance-drama troupe, we can’t help thinking, “Why leave this place?” Only after swearing by all we’ve eaten that we’ll be back do we manage to head for the airport and for Madurai.
“There’s no place to eat in Madurai,” professional food-lovers had assured us. But friends who are penniless academics know a different Madurai. Chasing down their gastronomic tips, we discover a very appealing food town indeed. Since the eighth century, the city has been teeming with Hindu pilgrims who flock to the spectacular Sri Meenakshi Temple, where Siva and his consort, Parvati, preside over a vast, shadowy maze lined with statues of gods and goddesses. Devotees hurry barefoot through the dark halls, bearing coconuts and fruit for the deities, who in return offer prasad—their own food, cooked in the temple and sold to worshipers. The historian has no intention of passing up this food of the gods and insists on buying a rocklike cracker and a crumbly round sweet from the temple’s prasad booth. The cook, who on occasion would have happily scarfed down raw salads and tap water if the historian hadn’t yanked her back, is actually repelled. “You don’t know when that stuff was cooked,” says the cook, unmoved by the historian’s description of a more transcendent cuisine, fresh for eternity. Finally, we both try the prasad. They’re cold, hard, and tasteless but otherwise, according to the historian, perfect.
The academics had been unanimous about Madurai’s star culinary attraction: a chain of three Murugan Idly shops. Idlies and dosas, which both begin with a lightly fermented batter of rice flour and lentils, represent South India’s vegetarian cuisine at its most irresistible. Shaped into oval dumplings and steamed, the batter becomes idlies. Poured on a hot griddle, it becomes large crêpe-like dosas. At Murugan, the batter is a little more sour than most, producing wonderfully moist, soft idlies that keep their character even after being dunked into fresh coconut chutney and a brightly seasoned sambar. As for a crisp, tart Murugan dosa—sometimes brushed with clarified butter—we think it may be the greatest food in the world. Until we taste an uttapam, a smaller, thicker pancake, here slathered with fried shallots. All are served with beautiful simplicity, on banana leaves.
Madurai also boasts what becomes our favorite dive, a place called Konaar Kadai that’s open only at night. When we arrive at 9:30 p.m. men are clustered thickly around a storefront where a cook sits at a grill and women are eating in the backseats of the cars parked all around. Instantly spotted as tourists, we are led up three narrow flights of stairs to a tiny room off the landing. A waiter appears and looks at us inquiringly; all we can think to do is look inquiringly back at him. He disappears, then brings us some dosas that have been torn up and scrambled with egg. This is nice enough, but it’s not until we’re back on the street that we understand why our informants are so excited about the place. Something utterly delicious-smelling is sizzling on the grill; it looks like a thick dosa topped with shredded meat and a fried egg. “Mutton dosa,” says a man who sees us craning our necks for a better view. “That’s it!” cries the cook of the two of us. “That’s what you’re supposed to order here!” Transfixed, she moves through the all-male crowd and points to the dosa. “Parcel?” asks a man assisting the cook. “Yes,” she says, remembering the women eating in cars. “To go.” He wraps the dosa in layers of banana leaf, then newspaper, and ties the package with string. Half an hour later, we unwrap our parcel in the bar of our hotel and order fresh lime sodas. The dosa is still warm and fragrant, and the meat—spice-rubbed mutton, fried and shredded with egg—has sunk comfortably into the soft pancake. We crow with pleasure over the ultimate late-night snack.
In the big, hectic city of Chennai (formerly called Madras), we find some genuinely user-friendly restaurants. Any tourist, for instance, can walk into one of the 14 restaurants of the Saravana Bhavan chain and choose from a huge menu of vegetarian snacks and meals. We can’t stop ordering wadas, fried crisp on the outside and pillowy soft inside, spiced with black pepper and drenched in the creamy, full-flavored yogurt we find all over South India.
Grand Sweets & Snacks is another inviting place that requires no ingenuity to track down: We simply ask a hotel staffer for the best sweets in Chennai. Indian desserts have a terrible reputation among Americans—who think them too sweet, too weird—but the buttery, crumbly squares called Mysore pak and the warm milk dumplings served in cream with almonds and cardamom are sublime.
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.