A Hidden Jewel
Sometimes things just work out perfectly. Dinner tonight was one such example of this. I had an email from my friend Shilpa Pandit answering a question from me about vegetarian restaurants close to my rooms at the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS) in the Adyar district of Chennai. She said that not far from us was a good restaurant that specialised in organic traditional rural food. Its name was Prems Graama Bhojanam.
We looked it up on Google maps and set off to find it. Not so easy as there was no clear signage and as Dante and I scanned the street. So was walked slowly along and peered into shop windows. We suddenly saw a small green sign not above a door but embedded amongst other signs clustered around a post. It had the words Prem and some Tamil script and then the word Bhojanam but there was no building that resembled a restaurant, we totally missed the well lit little sign above that is shown in the photo below! I approached a guard near another building and pointed at the sign and he gestured that we should go down an alley way and the said (waving his arms) stairs.
We looked somewhat doubtfully down the alley — it was dark and shadowy and an elderly man sat in the shadows looking at his smart phone (he was playing an electronic version of checkers). So we walked past him and some meters in we saw the stairs and there was a sign at the top with the restaurant’s name stating that it was “A Vegetarian Village Mess”. So up we went and a group of people eating there looked at us in total surprise. How could these tourists have found this place? I am sure that is what they were thinking. I smiled knowingly and sent a blessing to Shilpa.
The proprietor, whose name was Krishnamurti, came up to us and spoke good English. He explained that this wasn’t an ordinary eatery — it was vegetarian and didn’t use wheat, cow’s milk or rice of any kind; that it offered only ragi (millet) based dishes without any of the usual additives. He was obviously both proud of his village mess but also apologetic as he thought we would want ‘the usual’. I told him that we were very happy to eat ragi, that truthfully, we often ate it at home; that we were also very comfortable eating a wide range of local foods.
I told him also that we didn’t eat onion or garlic. This led to an interesting discussion on the philosophies of food. He said he’d have to look at what we could have as many items were pre-made. So he came to us with ragi idly, ghee dosa and two chutneys — one coconut and the other peanut based. There were also ragi fried puffy dumplings which we broke into bits and dipped into the chutneys. The flavours were amazing. But it didn’t stop there he followed this with kavuni puttu — a sweet black rice and jaggery mix that was dry and you compressed with your fingers.
As we ate Krishnamurti would come back and check on us and sit sometimes to talk about the food and the reasons why they cooked this way — health, tradition etc and I was thinking all along about my interest in cultural citizenship and creative traditionalism and its expression here in this hidden little restaurant filled with bright colours, a very pubic shrine to Lord Krishna, folk style paintings on the wall and a lot of customers coming through. We finished with a coconut kulfi from a small earthen pot.
This was a magic spot! It was not just Krishnamurti though that enjoyed this space. His staff and customers all seemed to be in a really relaxed and easy-going space. There was a touch of the village mess about it. This was a place for locals, living pasts and open futures that were well hidden and brightly humble. Off the beaten track can mean many things just as creative traditionalism can too. For me that was the lesson in finding this hidden jewel.
