Food History

A LAVISH LEAF

FTAlmanac

November 18, 2025

Madurai meets Arcot meets Tanjore at a
Jamavar meal in Chennai, says TFTA editor
and food historian Anoothi Vishal.

By Anoothi Visha

The rains that sweep Chennai in winters, causing the city to not just brave afternoon downpours, but to come to a standstill in the deluge as we’ve seen, are a bit early in September this year. The waves are high in the Bay of Bengal. I can see the froth and roar as I peer out of the window of my suite at the Leela Palace Chennai — the city’s only hotel nudging the sea. Perched by the Adyar creek, at one end of the long Marina Beach, it recalls older eras of Chettiyar mansions, an enviable collection of Tanjores, yards of silk, ancient woods and sandalwood — whose smell is vivid all around. We may have been in a prosperous home of a sailor in a Chola century. But that’s only until we sit at a swish bar and dine at an uber popular Asian restaurant with Cantonese dim sum and Singapore style crab. Chennai is a city where the old and the new have always met. You only have to see the Arcot heritage, Colonial remains, Tamil biryanis and tiffins rub shoulders with its al fresco cafes and fashion stores, with Japanese restaurants and its cult of dessert and ice cream parlours, and meet long-time residents who plan for weeks which marghazi sabha canteen to eat at as much as the next tasting menu or pop-up, currently chic!

Over the years, we’ve seen many sides of Chennai. But today is unusual. A Kari Virundhu has been laid out by the chefs at Jamavar—a bespoke meal recreating a banquet typically set on banana leaves for a bride coming back to her parental home after the wedding. There’s Chintamani chicken, mutton uppu kari, chettinad urulai roast, kootu, meen kuzambu, varuval, Erode nattukozhi, idiyappam,

bun parotta, rice, appalam, pickles, desserts and of course beeda — betel leaf and nut that end every ceremonial meal in virtually every part of India, from Chennai to Assam, Gujarat to Lucknow.

Chefs Ravish, executive chef, and Gopi, master chef, have worked hard to give us a taste of Tamil food in all its beguiling variety; five different regional cuisines, not one, as nuances, textures, flavours, and spices change from Madurai to Tanjore, from the coast to the interiors, from Cosmopolitan Presidency headquarters to the villages. It’s this food and its complex heritage that hotels such as this are preserving. With a luxury consumer increasingly interested in his or her roots and in discovering the cultural underpinnings of all culinary escapades, these lavish, traditional feasts are in demand and not just by the traditionalists but by the experience seekers. What this recreation and research also does is to take tastes forward, marrying newer techniques with forgotten ingredients and nuances. For us, it kicks off a rediscovery of Chennai— all the impulses that have made it and still make it tick.

Silks, tiffins, temples, a living heritage

Of all of India’s bustling metropolitan cities with their new
aspirations and rising wealth, Chennai is perhaps the mostentrenched in a sense of its past. Or, at least that is both the
stereotype and sense you get as you stop by and meet many
of its residents both old and new— including those from the
north, cutting across communities and regions. Having visited
the city fairly often in the last decade and a half, I have seen
it change and yet remain the same moored in its deep culture
and pride for things that matter—books, classical music,
beautiful silk sarees much more than other vain acquisitions!

There have been a fair number of memorable moments
and encounters here: Meeting a Tamil film maker who
invited my aunt and I home and gifted us a beautiful brass
filter for coffee, going for a morning walk at the prestigious
Boat Club, driving to a quiet beach at midnight, returning to
Sundari Silk on every visit, eating a meal in a mango orchard
on the outskirts cooked by India’s top chefs, weaving my way
through Mylapore’s ancient lanes, past the tank, the bangle
and flower sellers, inside the sacred Kapaleeshwar temple,
and then for Pongal at Rayar’s mess (a small vegetarian eatery,
established in 1930 at Arundale street in Mylapore) —on
Pongal! Talking at the Hindu Lit Fest, eating an off-the-menu
Udupi style breakfast at Mathsya with soft mini banana dosas
and pathrode that you’d otherwise eat in Mangalore, dining
at Poonusamy with my publisher over Chettiyar dishes and
biryani, ribbon and cashew pakodas in the evening at Anand Breakfast at Murugan’s: (Clockwise from left) TFTA columnist Ashwin Ahmad, Ravish Mishra, Anoothi Vishal and
co-founder of Hoppers London Karan Gokani at the famous Murugan Idli shop in Chennai.

Sweets, and even meeting the erstwhile Prince of Arcot and
drinking an oud flavoured sherbet at his home. It’s a city,
where surprisingly, I haven’t felt an outsider.

Canteen eateries came
up to cater to the
Madras Presidency’s
huge workforce and
evolved into the veg
dosa-idli eateries, now
popular globally

This time, I find Chennai is more open than ever before. For breakfast—tiffin, as it is dubbed, after the vegetarian mid-morning snacks carried by the educated Tam Brahm workforce when this was the administrative headquarters of the Madras Presidency—chef Ravish and Ankur take us to their favourite idli chain, Murugan. Rapidly expanding, with outlets in several parts of the city, it has emerged as a current favourite not the least because of its gorgeously fluffy medhu vada but the decadent innovation, its ghee podi onion uthappam, which is addictive. The friendly service is a far cry from the stern Woodland type meals of yore, where quick turnovers and eating in silence were the norm. But here, as we chat companionably, the server from Bihar, who is ladling out the sambaar, tells us about how he has learnt the nuances of a true tiffin service. Accompanying us are chefs from the UK—Hoppers cofounder Karan Gokani and his team, all on a food trip through southern India.

Military hotels, mess and Madurai-style meals

If dosa-idli are India’s best known breakfasts and “fast food”,
whose cult is growing via Insta-friendly restaurants (think
Benne dosa and thatte idli that no one quite knew even three
years ago), it is thanks to a long pre-Independence legacy of the
Madras Presidency. With a huge number of educated young
men employed by the Colonial administration, the concept of
a substantive all-vegetarian tiffin came up, as a mid-morning
meal. Since most of these young men were from the vegetarian
Tam Brahm or South Canara communities in Madras as well
as cities such as Bangalore with its cantonment, two styles of
eateries catering to this middle class came up in the early 20th
century. Woodlands Hotel (established
in 1938) in Chennai was a pioneer in
establishing the Udupi style of breakfasts
with its distinctive, slightly sweeter
sambaar (as did MTR in Bangalore,
established in 1924). Dasaprakasha, that
too was a Chennai institution was also a
leader in taking Udupi style food not just
all India but global.

The cult of Udupi restaurants across
India and the world have their genesis
in these institutions of the Madras presidency. Even though, if you are a
sambaar connoisseur, you may note that
all the regional and micro regional eats
are different in nuances. The Tamil-style
sambaar, for instance, is more sour and
in some micro regions spicier than the
milder and sweeter Udupi sambaar of the
temple meals. (Places like Madras Café in
Mumbai serve this style.)

The other genre of restaurant food that Chennai or the Madras presidency pioneered is the “Mess” food. “Mess” or “Military Hotels” in the early 20th century was a shorthand for establishments serving non vegetarian food with their origins in the military messes of British India. Chennai institutions like Poonusamy and Velu serving Madurai-style and Chettinad non vegetarian meals were modelled on these early military hotels.

Today, both Chef Ravish and my friend Shonali Muthalaly, The Hindu’s food critic, tell me that the mess to go to rustic non vegetarian Tamil food, including offal and a variety of biryanis is the Erode Amman Mess. Ravish in fact took Karan and the team from Hoppers for a very substantive lunch discovery to this Amman Mess and you will hopefully see some of the discoveries go international too. But the meal that Ravish and the fantastic chef Gopi deeply entrenched in the culture of the state cooked up for me at the hotel was outstanding, building in regionality, different ingredients and bold flavours and spices on a banana leaf. It reminded me of the meals that chef Praveen Anand, one of Chennai’s institutions would showcase, while my aunt and I curated our own Mathur khana in this city.

Military hotels or “mess”
were shorthand for
early 20th cen eateries
serving non vegetarian
food. Legends like
Poonusamy and Velu
were a continuation of
this food tradition

Tamil biryani deconstructed

The last five or so years have seen a huge renaissance of
Tamil-style biryanis. Thalappakatti is now world famous, and
people are curious to know the differences between Arcot and
Ambur, Dindigul or Chettinad style rice-with-spice. Some
years ago, when I visited Amir Mahal in Royalpettah to meet
the family of the titular Prince of Arcot, I asked them about
the Arcot biryani. Arcot was, through medieval history, part
of the Carnatic state that itself was under the larger Nizamat
of Hyderabad. In 1867, the queen Victoria of England created
the “Nawab of Arcot” as a separate title under the crown.
The royal family lived in their Chepauk (6 parks) palace till it
was acquired by the state; the cricket stadium still bearing the
name of the large estate.

What we call as the Arcot biryani today is really many different localised styles of biryani all over the erstwhile Arcot principality. The biryani of the erstwhile royal family is a Lucknowi style “pucca” dum biryani, rich with nuts, cardamom, scented spicing and saffron. Over time, the basmati of the northern Lucknowi biryani (used also in Hyderabai kachchi biryani as well as in Kerala’s moplah biryani) got replaced by the local small-grained seeraga samba rice. As cooks from the royal kitchen went back to their small home towns, more robust, spiced, one-pot or tawa assembled and localised versions of the originally layered and delicate biryani were created. The Thalappakatti biryani started off in the 1950s in Dindigul, by a former chef of the family. Today, it is a chain with multiple outlets. There is also the Ambur biryani, also an innovation, cooked like a singlepot pulao and spices, named after the Arcot state capital.

But there are different centres of
gastronomy in the state. The food of
the Chettiyars aside (for which another
article may be necessary), the Madurai
style “biryani” or rice with spice dishes
are distinctly different from the Tanjore
style, which may remind you of the Maharashtrian masala
bhat, with a use of the Deccani spice pathar ke phool/kalpasi,
a black lichen that grows on rocks and is used in both the
Maharastrian Goda masala and the Hyderabadi kachchi dum
biryani. That’s because Tanjore was an outpost of the Maratha
empire, and the Saraswati Mahal Library there has tomes
with quintessential Maratha recipes adapted to the south.

The Jamavar meal on a leaf ends with two distinct
types of biryanis served up by Gopi—one Madurai and
the other influenced by Tanjore. These were some of the
most tasteful biryanis I have tasted within or without the
messes. A discovery of Chennai may as yet be at your
restaurant’s table!