Udupi Restaurants Everywhere

I was amused that a North Indian like Devansh Malik could write about how Udupi restaurants and hotels spread across the country (It’s because he has lived in Udupi for 2 years).

 

As someone who lived there, he knows the local cuisine:

“No, I’m not talking about the typical dosa, idli, sambhar kind of south indian comfort food. That’s what most people (read: my fellow North Indians) picture.”

The local cuisine specialities of Udupi are all non-veg. Chicken ghee roast. Kori roti. Chicken sukka with some neer dosa. Fish curries. And yet, he says Udupi restaurants are almost always vegetarian!

“They don’t serve the non-veg food I just described.”

What was the story behind all this? How come everywhere? Why only veg?

~~

 

The tale starts with Udupi, the temple town, built around the Sri Krishna Matha.

“Krishna is worshiped as Anna Brahma, the god of food. And feeding people is one of the core religious duties of the temple. Every single day, the temple kitchen feeds hundreds of people.”

And who were the cooks at the temple? Shivalli Brahmins. That fact, and it being temple food, the food was all veg.

 

Wikipedia says there was a massive flood in 1923 that destroyed the region so badly that everyone, including the cooks, had to leave town, scatter, and that is how Udupi food spread. Nice tale, logical… except Malik couldn’t find any record of any flood on that kind of scale in the region! (Of course, like all things on the Internet, once it is on Wikipedia, there is no dearth of other sites that will repeat the tale… but all using Wikipedia as source).

 

So Malik dug deeper. Turned out the Shivalli Brahmins were slowly pushed out. Not by force, but for good old economic reasons. As economic prospects of these Brahmins deteriorated, they found their options were limited. They didn’t own much land, and the merchant community was close-knit. What about government jobs?

“Udupi sat at the far edge of what was then the Madras Presidency… The good government jobs were largely taken up by Tamil Brahmins. Even the jobs closer to home mostly went to other local communities.”

The only skill they did have was cooking running large kitchens at scale. So they scattered to nearby towns and cities and opened restaurants (the occupation related to their skill).

 

But that doesn’t explain it all.

“A few cooks opening restaurants in a few cities is one thing. An Udupi hotel in almost every corner of the country is another.”

How did that happen? Well, this was before the idea of trademarks had taken hold. So nobody owned the brand “Udupi”. So each cook who opened a restaurant or hotel gave named it Udupi since it was already well known, thanks to the temple. This pattern repeated itself again and again.

“So the restaurant kept copying itself, city after city, year after year.”

Several of these owners even helped their employees to save and open their own restaurant elsewhere. A few of these even became larger chains, the most famous of them being the Woodlands one, which is all over Chennai.

 

That explains both the spread of Udupi restaurants and also why they are all veg. Within veg, over time, they have expanded to allow cuisines that were nothing like the original temple food. Gobi manchurian. Paneer butter masala. Fried rice. But nothing non-veg.