Porotta in huge demand as dine-in services pick up

Porotta in huge demand as dine-in services pick up

No prizes for guessing which food item Malayalees are relishing the most after dine-in services were restarted in restaurants.

KOCHI: No prizes for guessing which food item Malayalees are relishing the most after dine-in services were restarted in restaurants. It is porotta, the layered flatbread made from maida, now caught in the eye of a storm after the Karnataka bench of the Authority for Advance Ruling imposed a GST of 18 per cent on frozen ‘parotas’ of various kinds.

The Kerala Hotel and Restaurant Association (KHRA) said there has been a huge demand for porotta since the relaxation of the lockdown norms.“Almost all customers now come to restaurants for porotta. Some restaurants are selling 1,500 to 1,000 porottas a day. Without porotta in the menu, we won’t be able to attract customers,” KHRA general secretary G Jayapal told TNIE. 

He said the new GST ruling will not be applicable to the porotta -- a perennial favourite of Keralites while eating out -- being sold in hotels and restaurants in the state. As per KHRA’s rough estimate, a restaurant in Kerala sells at least 100 porottas a day on an average, while there is no estimate on the sales at thousands of wayside eateries. A 2016 report by the Kerala Directorate of Economics and Statistics put the number of hotels and restaurants in the state at around 40,000.

Despite campaigns against the consumption of porotta, highlighting its ill-effects on health, Malayalees continue to prefer porotta, Jayapal said. “The main reason for the huge demand is that it isn’t easy to make porotta at home and Malayalees missed the taste of porotta in combination with their favourite vegetarian or non-vegetarian curries during the lockdown,” he said.

K P Muhammed Abdul Huq, Kozhikode district secretary of KHRA and owner of Paradise Hotel, said porotta is the most sold food item. “A majority of the orders are for porotta. It’s not just our case, almost all hotels in Kozhikode are witnessing a demand for porotta,” he said.

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