How did Udupi get to be a city favourite? A culinary tour with Kunal Vijayakar
How come the idli is everywhere? And why is our rasam so sweet? Take a look at how one cuisine took over the eating-out scene, and then evolved to get even more popular.
I went down to the lawns of my friend Cyrus Broacha’s building society for a little Diwali get-together. His is a small society with hardly eight flats, so the crowd was small yet motley. There was Cyrus and his family, half Parsi and half Goan; a couple of Sindhi neighbours; a Maharashtrian family; a proper, up-market south Mumbai Parsi couple; a Gujarati family; young Punjabi parents with little kids, and more.
It was an early get-together, no alcohol, but considering that maybe only two or three people were vegetarian, I was pleasantly surprised that the food was a long buffet of freshly made vegetarian south Indian delicacies.
Dosas, rasam-vada, medu vada, sambar, chutney, and innovative starters, some with cheese, some with chopped onion and coriander, and some with south Indian gunpowder, all made with the same rava and rice batter. And I looked around this patch of lawn in Malabar Hill and this vivid group of people enjoying a cuisine that is native to none of their homes or families. Food can truly bring people together and break the narrow shackles of regionalism. And the south Indian Udupi cuisine truly has.
In today’s day and age it may be a bit precarious to bring up regionalism, but I have two views on the subject. One is a negative view. It’s an insular and small-minded political attribute, where you have an obsessive love and attachment for your own region that can supercede what you feel for your country.
On the other hand, the more positive way to look at regionalism is that India springs from its cultural and linguistic diversity, and I see no reason why one cannot help to preserve and promote language, customs, cultures, foods and the ways of life of a particular land.
About 50 years ago or so, political turpitude and sub-regional chauvinism could have wiped out a whole culture from this city of Mumbai. Local youth, under the burden of their own insecurities and further aroused by a regional political party, turned vicious, took up cudgels and besieged south Indians in Mumbai, vandalising their homes, their lives and their restaurants. Those very restaurants that were the lifestream and subsistence of the middle class. The Udupi restaurants.
Thank God better sense prevailed, eventually. If not for that, the welcoming sign ‘Rice plate is ready’ outside an Udupi restaurant would have become history.
Udupi is but a small place in Mangaluru. I’ve been to the Krishna Temple there and eaten at the small dosa place right outside the walls, a place that claims to have invented the Masala Dosa. It’s temple tradition that gave Udupi cuisine its rudiments. It is the Bunts (the Shettys and the Nayaks) whose business acuity and foresight took the cuisine out of Mangaluru. And in doing so, they made idli, dosa and sambar an integral part of cuisine across India.
These restaurants were in every nook and corner of this city and flourished because of their hot, quick, tasty and pure food, and the staple lunch for the hard working Mumbaikar, a plate of vegetables, sambar and a mound of steamed white rice. The Rice Plate.
The story starts somewhere in the 1920s. Rama Nayak, a boy of 11, lands in Mumbai from his village in Karnataka. After 10 years of working in the backrooms of a restaurant, chopping and cleaning, he starts his own stall in Matunga, selling idlis and dosas. The local Tamilian and Kannadiga populations take to his food and, in 1942, he opens Udupi Shri Krishna, the first Udupi restaurant in the city, so they believe and so they say.
The Matunga area, once predominantly inhabited by south Indians, is home to most of the traditional Udupi restaurants in the city. Like the 80-something-year-old Ram Ashray, near Kings Circle, Matunga. Known for its early morning breakfasts of idli podi, onion rava dosa, rasam vada and filter coffee. Or Anand Bhavan, for bisi bele bhaat, or Cafe Madras and Cafe Mysore, the list can go on.
Rama Nayak’s restaurant still stands near Matunga station. Still dishing out traditional south Indian meals on banana leaves.
As the story progressed, the Mangalorean owners of these restaurants, namely the Shettys and the Kamats, moved away from central Mumbai, towards the business district, to Fort, Crawford Market and Nariman Point, monopolising lunchtimes and evening meals. Sadanand, Status, Samarambha, Sri Krishna Bhavan, Suvidha and Kamat became household names, and each excelled at serving scrumptious medu wadas, buttery and golden dosas, innovating on uttapams and tweaking the sambar with a bit of sweet to bring the hordes of Gujarati and other vegetarian Mumbaikars into their fold.
You couldn’t find a seat at most of these places through the week, and the queues outside Status competed with the queue at the 108 BEST bus stop.
But that wasn’t enough for the Shettys, as they expanded slowly into seafood and alcohol. And that’s a story for next week.