With the week-long Onam celebrations on, a typical Sadhya meal is on every foodie’s wish-list. Giving Delhi denizens a new spot to indulge in the traditional Onam fare, the award-winning restaurant Savya Rasa from Bengaluru, has curated a 30-dish feast for this weekend at its recently opened city outpost.
The Sadhya dishes include boiled rice, all kinds of curries, papadam, plain yogurt or buttermilk, banana or plantain chips, and desserts. Given that the Sadhya is a vegetarian feast, we are welcome to supplement it with the restaurant’s carnivorous offerings, which round up some of the best representative foods of the states south of the Deccan.
The menu meanders through various culinary geographies that are Kongunadu, Chettinad, Malabar (Moplah), Nasrani (Syrian Christian), Mangaluru, Mysuru, and many more that lie scattered across the southern states, providing a tasteful snapshot of each style and sensibility of dining and feeding.
We start with the Thengai Paal Rasa from the Kongu Nadu region, which sees the fierce heat of a textbook rasam tempered by gentle coconut milk and ghee-perfumed tomatoes, making for a medley of flavours and sensations, which is only right given that Kongu Nadu traverses three of the five southern states.
Keeping it company are Konaseema Kodi Veppudu and the Mini Meen Polichathu; the former comprising gentle desiccated chicken with a bite being marinated in the popular and piquant guntur chilli of Nelvlore. Meanwhile the mini filets of seer fish, marinated in a tangy paste redolent with tamarind, are rolled in a banana leaf and griddled on a tawa, presenting you with all the masaledar morsels you could wish for.
For our mains, we get the Milagu Kozhi Chettinad, which is chicken gravy rendered robust with the famed crushed black pepper of the region, further scented with star anise, edible lichen, coconut and curry leaves. Accompanying this is the Bun Parotta, a puffy, yet still crunch multi layered bread made with refined wheat flour, egg and butter making it ideal for mopping up that spicy chicken.
For dessert, we indulge in the Kavuni Arisi Halwa, a sweet-as-sin rice kedgeree thickened with milk and cashew nuts and a somehow even more decadent Karupatti Halwa, a melt-in-the-mouth gelatinous sweet made with reduced palm sugar syrup, rice flour, clarified butter and fried cashew nuts. As you can imagine, we leave the restaurant with our own Maha Belly.
AT: Shop no 242,
DLF Avenue, Saket
PRICE (FOR TWO) Rs 2,400 (including taxes)