Kappa Chakka Kandhari

I thought I knew the food of Kerala. I have been to the state many times. It’s my wife’s favourite cuisine. Bangalore has many many good Malayalee restaurants in every locality. I have been to friends’ homes and visited their estates. Anyone who has eaten over a hundred Malayalee meals KNOWS Malayalee food, right? Then I went to Kappa Chakka Kandhari and I realised I knew nothing.

Chef Regi Matthew serves no Malabar parathas. He serves no biryani. He says that that’s not food he ate at his home in the tiny village of Netta and he serves food from the homes of Kerala, the food cooked by the mothers of Kerala. Homes and toddy shops. He spent 3 years putting together the menu. He ate at 265 houses. And 70 toddy shops. Learnt the recipes. In every district. With every community. He spent months cajoling home chefs to come and cook their food in a restaurant. An idly that only four families make and have made for over a hundred years. A roasted clam that takes you to the deepest backwaters far away from the tourist throngs of Alappuzha.  He found the best place for tapioca, with the smooth texture of a potato and the earthy flavour of kappa. The best estate for cardamom and pepper. The purest cold pressed coconut oil. Jackfruit picked and cooked so that it is just ripe enough, neither hard nor fermenting. He took a wisdom and a cuisine that goes back centuries and freed it from the stereotypes and cliches and breathed new life into it. 

Kappa means Tapioca. Chakka is jackfruit. Kandhari is the bird eye chilli. Ingredients abundantly available to every child growing up in Kerala but infused with nostalgia and longing to the adult Malayalee going about their life and work and dreaming of home and the gently swaying coconut trees, the still waters flecked with silver and green, and the smell of their mother’s cooking wafting through the air. 

Make no mistake. Kappa Chakka Kandhari is a pathbreaking restaurant. Of course it is the greatest Malayalee restaurant in the world. But it is much more than that. It is one of the great Indian restaurants. If Indian food is to ever claim it’s place as one of the world’s great cuisines, we need more chefs with the courage to embrace our culinary heritage with integrity, with depth, with research, with sweat and honesty, with courage and conviction. This is a restaurant with zero compromise, one that is single handedly restoring a great cuisine to its rightful place, showing how much wider and deeper it goes than the appams and stews and beef fries and Malabar biryanis and parathas we are used to. 

Restaurants like Kappa Chakka Kandhari and Karavalli and Bengaluru Oota Company and Oota are every bit as important to India’s food story as Masque and Indian Accent. And collectively, they aren’t writing a new chapter, they’re writing a whole new book.

I ate: 

Absolute Kandhari: A drink of birds eye chilli and lemon that would have gone really well with Vodka 

Prawn Kizhi cooked with coconut masala and grilled in a banana leaf

• Syrian beef fry with shallots and curry leaves

• Mutton coconut fry

• Pineapple nendram masala. An exquisite pineapple relish made with nendram banana, like a sweet pineapple jelly with a hint of chilli and spice
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• Neimeen nellikka masala. Seer fish marinated and shallow fried with dry gooseberry peppercorns and Kandhari chilli masala

• Kappa vada served with a tamarind chutney

• Mussels Roast

• Koorka fry. Chinese potatoes with a more earthy flavour and texture without the heaviness and starch of a regular potato.
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• Kakka fry - toddy shop style clams. This is an unforgettable dish, all it needed was some beer or toddy to drink with it and I would have been in heaven.
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• Kozhuva fry. Tiny backwater fish fried with simple spices and curry leaves. Again a dish I couldn’t get enough of.

• Idierachi. Sundried tenderloin crushed and tossed with shallots Curryleaves and a dash of virgin coconut oil

• Pidi and Kozhi curry - rice dumplings cooked with coconut milk and served with chicken curry

• Tender coconut pudding. This is addictive. Like a panacotta, but lighter, airier, and packed with flavour. This will become a dessert that people will travel for like Manish Mehrotra’s Daulat Ki Chaat.

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• Kandhari Ice cream. The perfect balance of spicy and sweet

Yes I know I ate excessively. But who cares. I feel I didn’t eat enough. And I need to go back! With some 5 people so I can eat every damn dish on the menu.