Sam Mendelsohn

Jul 30, 2024

Bangalore

Updated: Aug 7, 2024

This post will start with an intro and sightseeing guide, and then a very long food guide, and then short sections on recommended reading and movie theaters of Bangalore.

See more photos in my wife's Instagram highlights.

Bangalore is easily the least interesting of India’s major cities, but it is also the most livable. If you were to force me to settle down in one Indian megacity, I’d probably choose Bangalore, but it’s the lowest on my list of places to visit as a tourist. You’re better off flying here and driving to Mysore. I nonetheless really enjoyed the one week I spent here in April 2023, and I would happily come back.

A good chunk of the aforementioned livability is due to the weather. I was there in late April and I think that’s as hot as it gets here. Afternoons were hot, but there’s plenty of shade in most places which keeps you cool, and at its worst it’s not that bad. The pollution isn’t that bad (relatively). The abundant greenery gives Bangalore the most natural beauty of India’s megacities, and a number of neighborhoods are genuinely nice and pleasant to walk around in.

I was surprised to learn that Bangalore’s tree diversity is very high. From TOI: “Bangalore’s street trees have a healthy diversity, with the most dominant species constituting less than 10% of total population. By contrast in Syracuse, USA, three most common species constitute almost two-thirds of street trees; in Chicago, four most common species comprise two-thirds of the entire population Bangalore compares favourably to highlypopulated cities like Mexico City, where four most common species constitute 49% of trees In highly-populated Asian cities like Bangkok, one species constitutes over 40% of trees.” (h/t Devon Zuegel)

I was also surprised to learn that Bangalore’s elevation is 920 meters (3,020 feet) above sea level, higher than Lonavla and Dehradun, to name a few places (h/t Shrikanth_Krish).

It was interesting to learn about Bangalore’s longstanding role as a science/tech city well before the recent IT boom. From the book Askew (see more on it later):

“The hype and triumphalism of IT’s unstoppable march led many to believe that the industry had sprouted in the city by happenstance. Actually, history and planning had combined to develop Bangalore, unnoticed at the time, into a hub of futuristic growth. Tipu Sultan himself started it. As early as the 1780s his engineers had invented rocketry, terrorizing the British. The colonizers on their part chose Bangalore as the headquarters of the oldest of the three engineering groups of the British Indian Army—the Madras Sappers. It was this centre that developed the Bangalore Torpedo, a mine-clearing weapon used in the First and Second World Wars and still in the armoury of many armies. Diwan Seshadri Iyer began harnessing waterfalls and in 1904 Bangalore became the first Indian city to have streets lighted by electricity. Sir M (as Diwan M. Visvesvaraya was popularly known) did the rest with his slogan ‘Industrialize or Perish’. He invited Walchand Hirachand to start Hindustan Aircraft Factory, today’s HAL, in Bangalore. He also persuaded Jamshetji Tata to set up the (Tata, and later Indian) Institute of Science on 371 acres of land contributed by the Maharaja of Mysore. That turned Bangalore into a focal point of advanced scientific research. C. V. Raman, who became its first Indian director, later opened his own Indian Academy of Sciences and the Raman Research Institute a few kilometres away. When India began its pioneering space programmes, Bangalore became the headquarters of ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation). A hundred engineering colleges also sprouted in the city in a span of a few years.”

On a similar note, maybe, it was interesting to see cheap local restaurants promoting their high tech hygiene standards. CTR had what looked like giant security cameras hanging from the ceiling which turned out to be some sort of air purifier that claims to kill Covid and other viruses. I have no idea what it is or if it works, but a few fancier restaurants had it too, and I haven’t seen them anywhere else in India. Vidyarthi Bhavan had a sign about how they installed a reverse osmosis water system for all of the cooking. One restaurant (I forgot which) promoted its advanced steaming system to clean dishes. Then Veena Stores, in addition to its counter where you order and get a receipt that you take to another counter to place and collect your order, had machines outside to place your order and pay via UPI. Also, much more low-tech, but I greatly appreciated the multiple restaurants which had foot pedals at the hand washing sinks.

Bangalore sort of feels like the capital of South India, and this comes across in its diversity. Outside of Mumbai I think it's the most linguistically diverse of India’s major cities. The 2011 census says that only 42% of the city speaks Kannada, with the next most spoken languages being Tamil at 16% and Telugu at 14%. I would have guessed these numbers were more the case because of the tech boom, but as I understand it Bangalore has historically been very diverse and this is hardly a new development.

Sightseeing/Things To Do

What should one do in Bangalore? The food is the highlight here, really, and even if you don’t like eating, the old restaurants are the city’s best tourist attractions (the old world atmosphere, the people watching, the waiter balancing the plates at Vidyarthi Bhavan, etc). Beyond that, nothing is that exciting. I wouldn’t say Bangalore is short on heritage, but it’s not as plentiful as other big cities. There’s no cluster of amazing architecture, and even in the old neighborhoods the great buildings are either scattered or aren’t actually that great (like the kind of boring red British buildings around Cubbon Park). Some parts could have been nice heritage districts, but they aren’t, because the nice buildings are obstructed by ugly signs and what seems to me like totally extraneous construction (I wish I took photos, but the area around Brigade Road and Church St was a major offender here).

One of my favorite parts of traveling India is going to places where I feel like I’m stepping back in time, and in Bangalore you get that feeling at individual places but not actual neighborhoods. The old heritage eateries (MTR, Vidyarthi Bhavan, CTR, Koshy’s, etc) have old world magic in spades, but their neighborhoods (Basavanagudi and Malleshwaram, where the best food is, and by the way Malgudi derives from combining those two names), while still more traditional and more fun to walk around than the more modern parts of the city, don’t feel all that old. Aside from some of those old restaurants, the best “time warp” was probably going to the Taj West End (it’s worth going and paying for an overpriced beverage or two just to visit the place, very beautiful property, and make sure you ask to see the rain tree and rooftop garden!).

Unusually, I may have enjoyed walking around newer neighborhoods more than the older ones. Taking a stroll through the suburban bylanes of Koramangala and Indiranagar was very nice. There were some pretty stunning houses (some highlights were on 3rd Cross Rd near the Koramangala post office ground and 1st Cross Rd in Indiranagar), the sort that make you say “Whoa, that’s a really fancy looking hotel…wait that’s a house?!”, as well as some very large but incredibly tacky looking houses.

Walking around Church Street and many surrounding lanes was nice. Not all that exciting. I think seeing the many great book stores was a Bangalore highlight (the two separate Blossom Book Stores were fantastic, Book Worm was also really nice, and there are others I didn’t go into).

As for sightseeing, the Bangalore Palace is pretty awesome, a wild British castle in this big modern city. The interiors don’t have nearly as much of interest as other Indian palaces though. Keep in mind this was just one house of the Mysore rajas, not the main palace.

Vidhana Soudha is perhaps Bangalore’s and post-Independence India’s greatest work of architecture. (What are some other contenders? Don’t name some Charles Correa bullshit. Not sure how many people want to admit it but Kempegowda International Airport Terminal 2 is a contender). (Who was the architect for this? Wikipedia says Kengal Hanumanthaiah but he’s not an architect.)

The Tipu Sultan Palace is okay. The main one outside of Mysore is a thousand times better. This was still cool, though, worth seeing, and it was cool seeing the old Bangalore fort (I only got to drive by it once).

The KR Market is among the city’s better sites. Awesome market, especially the flowers! I also liked going to Russell Market and checking out Commercial Street, but that was less exciting.

Many of the other best pieces of architecture in the city seem to be the universities (there’s Indian Institute of Science, a few others look nice, and I’m skeptical of acclaimed modern architecture in India but IIM could be cool). Alas, I didn’t visit any and they don’t seem worth going out of your way for. As I said, things are very scattered here, it’s not like other big cities in India where you get tons of great architectural clusters.

Then there are random great buildings here and there. Nothing so extraordinary for an Indian city, though.

I regret that I couldn’t see Nandi Hills and the Bhoganandishwara Temple. Next time!

I think that’s it for architectural highlights?

One of the sightseeing highlights, though, was the Lalbagh Botanical Garden. Very beautiful, pleasant to walk through even around noon, lots of amazing trees, not too crowded on weekends (can’t say the same about the palace), highly recommended! But then, did you really come to Bangalore to go to a garden? (Then again, it is the garden city.) Duke Ellington performed at the garden’s glass house when he came to Bangalore in the 1963. I didn’t get a chance to walk through Cubbon Park, next time.

The museums are quite nice, too. None are essential, but I liked the National Gallery of Modern Art (exhibits change but there are I think three at a time, all were good and they were mostly well curated, the area is pretty as well), the Government Museum (quite small, doesn’t compare to the major museums in the other big cities, but there’s some great sculpture works and a great gallery of paintings, the art gallery next door is nice as well), and the Museum of Art and Photography (the free galleries were small and not that exciting, but the paid ones were both great and worthwhile, very well curated and more importantly air conditioned, the place is small but it’s one of the few very nicely put together museums in India). Definitely worth your time. I’ve heard good things about the Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath as well, and I’m curious about the Indian Music Experience Museum.

I did an enjoyable walking tour with Bangalore by Foot, though the time I was there they only had one walk on offer, showing KR market and the area around it, which to me was less interesting than a quaint, quiet neighborhood walk would have been. Still, the walk we did was cool, we saw much more of the flower market than we would have seen on our own, and one of the highlights of the tour was seeing a small textile dyeing business. I would love to do more walks in Bangalore, if anyone has any recommendations please send. I’ve heard great things about Gully Tours but that’s it.

Okay, now on to the really good stuff!

Food

I will break Bangalore’s restaurants into a few categories: small local places for breakfast/snacks, South Indian banana leaf thali restaurants, upscale South Indian restaurants, and notable non-South Indian restaurants. The first three categories should obviously be prioritized, and you should also plan and balance your meals well so that you can sufficiently appreciate the food in all three categories. If you eat meat, you’ll have to ask someone else about the military hotels, but even my vegetarian recommendations should have wide appeal to everyone, I don’t think you’ll be missing out if you take my lead!

Breakfast/snacks (+ filter coffee):

The South Indian breakfasts in Bangalore are phenomenal and among the best you will get anywhere. I went to many of the famous places and they all lived up to the hype, Bangalore might be a rare city where the famous places are famous for their food rather than for being famous. They blow the best of Mumbai’s South Indian breakfasts out of the water, and spending time in Bangalore will ruin these dishes for you to the point that what was once a totally acceptable idli/dosa/vada now seems mediocre. This is true of many places I’ve been in the south, but I found more concentrated excellence in Bangalore’s breakfast scene than anywhere else. I must say I am a huge fan of the crisp on the outside, spongy and soft on the inside dosa, there is no better dosa. (I will say, though, that the best chutneys I’ve had were at homestays, and I think I even prefer the chutneys offered in more upscale places to the ones that small “local” places serve.) And the ghee podi idlis and ghee podi dosas that some of the newer places offer are really sensational.

I pride myself in finding cool lesser known places that people may not find out about otherwise but this section is incredibly generic, no hidden gems here, basically the same stuff I assume anyone would recommend.

A quick rundown of some of the old famous places I went:

(Note, on weekends at some of these places the waits were 30-60 minutes, plan accordingly. Weekdays typically weren’t an issue, but you won’t always be able to get a seat immediately. Also, I say most of these places have bad coffees but keep in mind we get it without sugar, if you like it with sugar maybe you’ll feel differently.)

MTR - Great masala dosa and best ever rava idli, terrible coffee. Maybe my least favorite of these places for food (while still being top notch) but my favorite for the old world atmosphere, it’s an awesome restaurant. It’s a big chain now, but I felt the original has maintained what makes it great. I wouldn’t go to the branches. Good article on the restaurant and another on the packaged food business empires it spawned.

Brahmin’s - Great, impossibly soft idli, vada, upma, bad coffee.

CTR - Excellent benne masala dosa, doesn’t even need chutney, pretty good coffee.

Vidyarthi Bhavan - Everything great, I think I liked CTR’s dosa better but this was probably the second best, no chutneys required. Excellent old world charm.

Veena Stores - Idli, vada, chow chow, all maybe the best I’ve ever had. My wife says the coffee was good there, I don’t remember, but at least that means it wasn’t memorably bad like some of the others!

We also went to Koshy’s just for coffee, which was bad, but I love the old world atmosphere of the place and recommend going for coffee anyway. The food has its loyalists but there wasn’t anything I felt like wasting calories on when I was there, though I’ll give it a shot one day.

And some relatively newer places with the podi delicacies:

Rameswharam Cafe (Indiranagar but they have multiple branches) - Best filter coffee, very good open butter masala dosa, insanely good ghee podi idli.

Umesh Dosa Point - Very good podi masala dosa, mindblowing ghee podi idli. (On these last two, I say skip the masala dosa and go for plain podi dosa, the podi is the star here, masala just detracts from the magic, you can even be extreme and not even get any chutney or sambar.)

There were a few others we went to like SLV in Basavanagudi, that was great too, it didn’t stand out as much as the above places, but that still would be better than any place in Mumbai as I imagine is the case for countless places here.

Who wants to educate me on the geographical prevalence of podi and why it shows up at some places and not others? Do the old famous places (mostly Udupi, but they’ve been Bangalorized, I think) have it and I just didn’t know?

Filter Coffee

I will say that generally, as mentioned above, the filter coffees served at these restaurants were quite bad (though as I said we get it without sugar, and also I don’t really drink coffee and think it’s mostly bad and I don’t like hot liquids in general). Also as mentioned, I did like the coffee at CTR and I really liked it at Rameswharam. We also got good coffee from small outlets that only offer filter coffee, like Namma Coffee, and there are more small places like that which I think are better bets for coffee than most of the restaurants.

We also picked up around 10 filter coffee packets from different places across the city, some of them that I read about and marked on my map, some of them found just by typing in “coffee works” or similar phrases into google maps, some of them that we just saw while walking around. A few clunkers, but I was generally very satisfied with the quality and they are all inexpensive. Some highlights were Gayathri (Malleshwaram, though they’re from Mysore), Modern Coffee (at KR Market, cool old shop!) Sri Ramana (Indiranagar), and Sri Suma (near Indiranagar station). We usually just got whatever their main blends were, with chicory (often around 20-30%, I think), as they could give 100g of those while customized blends required larger orders. Whenever we asked for 100% arabica they tried to talk us out of it by saying it doesn’t taste good. That was funny.

My wife brewed these at home with her filter maker and we drank them with cold milk, the most delicious way to drink coffee and I find it bizarre that this isn’t a universal belief.

Banana Leaf Meals

As with other cities in South India, Bangalore’s food writers have let the city down by waxing extensively on the breakfast and snacks scene while largely ignoring the meals. Plenty of “mess” restaurants serve banana leaf meals (covering the gamut of South India) (or perhaps thali plate meals, I won’t discriminate against those if the food is good), and I’m sure there are many hidden gems offering outstanding homestyle food at miniscule costs, but nobody writes about them. This guy has devoted some portion of his life to exploring the city’s lesser known breakfast joints, good for him, I greatly respect the dedication, but I wish people would put more dedication into places that serve the meals, which is the heart of the cuisine. As a whole, Indian food writers greatly overindex on breakfast/snacks/street food and don’t do enough to promote good quality meals, which to me are superior and can be hard to find outside of homes, so promotion of them is needed. I only had one outstanding banana leaf meal, I think part of the reason I didn’t have great success in this category is because the best ones are likely in areas like Malleshwaram and Basavanagudi, where I would go for breakfasts but would generally not be during lunch time.

I can happily say I highly recommend the North Karnataka style Basaveshwar Khanavali in Jayanagar on ninth main road and Aurobindo marg. It should be noted that there are countless places with the same name all over Karnataka and many unaffiliated ones in Bangalore, though some may be part of a small chain along with this branch, but I am confused about it all. Anyway, I went to the original Basaveswhar in Hubli, it was outstanding, and this restaurant in Bangalore compared favorably. If that was a 10, this was probably a 9. Great homestyle food. Basaveshwar Khanavalis tend to have a pretty similar formula day by day, there’s generally an eggplant and a bean dish, sprouted matki, another lentil salad, a salad which usually has methi, a wet chutney, and amazing assorted dry chutneys which can have peanut, flax, and sesame, all served with jowar rotti. Peanut is used a lot in the gravies, and dil shows up as a flavoring which is uncommon in India. I was full by the time they got to the rice and sambar/rasam. They serve the holige at the beginning of the meal, but if you want it for dessert have them hold it off until the end so you get a hot one. The holige we got was with dal but it’s worth asking if they have shengdana or any other varieties as those are superior.

Other than that, there were no meals I highly recommend. Halli Mane in Malleshwaram was very good and had some great dishes, but I say it had too many dishes, not confined to a single cuisine (there was even palak paneer), and that took away from it for me, it didn’t come together as a special, cohesive meal the way my beloved Lingayat khanavals do. If they had a more focused village style meal, I would upgrade my rating. Nagarjuna (Andhra food, we went to the residency road branch) was a good enough meal, we had a sensational spinach dal and you can’t go wrong with a podi, ghee, rice combo, but everything else was fairly standard, a bit oily, didn’t feel especially homestyle or specific/detailed. The same could be said about Shree Krishna Kafe (Tamil food, Koramangala). I liked most of the dishes in the massive thali at Karnatic, but nothing stood out. I planned to eat at Udupi Shri Krishna Bhavan in Balapete (I think the Basavanagudi location is the same owners) on my last day but they are closed Tuesdays.

Upscale South Indian Restaurants

I think this is a special feature of Bangalore as none of the other big cities in South India have great restaurant scenes and South Indian food isn’t especially well represented in the other cities that do have great food scenes, though there are exceptions (moreso in Goa than Mumbai/Delhi).

Upscale Indian restaurants in India rarely offer food that is as good as what is served at local places, and the South has an endless amount of stellar local restaurants, but in Bangalore I found that at least a few of these upscale places were among the best meals, offering homestyle food that is both high quality and largely unique. That said, Bangalore doesn’t have anything along the lines of an Avartana or even a Hosa yet, something chef driven and innovative while taking inspiration from South India’s cuisines, and that does feel like a missed opportunity. Still, a few of the restaurants I went to had authentic, fully flavored, hard to find regional dishes, in nice settings, with good service, at prices that I found to be incredibly reasonable. This is the direction I would like to see India’s food scene go in!

Kappa Chakka Kandhari - Malayali food, also has a branch in Chennai. A must visit if you’re in Koramangala, and while it’s hard to say if it’s worth a trip all the way there just to eat here if you’re on a short trip (as there is certainly great food in other parts, and unless you have some personal reason to be in Koramangala it isn’t really a place to visit), it is definitely worth serious consideration. As much as I love the cuisine, I rarely go out for Kerala food anymore because I’ve had so much of it over the years and feel like I reached a wall, trying the same dishes over and over again, not breaking any new ground. I’ve had my fair share of Onam sadhyas, countless meals at Mumbai’s Deluxe in Fort, a meal at the terrific but sadly short lived Adipoli in Kalyan (the rare great restaurant in any place along the lines of a Kalyan), a few meals from the outstanding homechef Marina Balakrishnan, and did a trip to Kerala where the culinary highlight was without a doubt Philipkutty's Farm. With that in mind, I wasn’t expecting to be blown away at KCK despite the hype for it. And I was blown away! My wife and I shared two different vegetarian set menus (under 1000 inr each for the veg menus, astonishingly reasonable for the quality and quantity) allowing us to try over a dozen dishes. Some dishes were new to me, such as rice dumplings stuffed with mushrooms, but many were familiar, at least conceptually. Plantains, potatoes, tapioca, black chickpeas, cowpeas, etc, all heavy on coconut, nothing highly unusual in terms of concept. And yet, most of the dishes were so vibrantly flavored that I felt like I was tasting them for the first time. I am happy to award KCK my inaugural Like a Virgin Award, which I just thought of! My friend, in town from the U.S., was also thrilled with his chicken and mutton based set menu, and though it was his introduction to the cuisine and he didn’t have any reference points, he did remark that he was very impressed with the quality of the meats themselves. Included in our set menus were beverages which we could choose from a list, we got buttermilk, which was unusually good, nannari sharbat, which was nice, and a kandhari chili drink, which was undrinkably spicy, I coughed just sniffing it. Desserts are also included and you get to choose from the list, we got an outstanding coconut pudding, a delicious kandhari chili ice cream (perfectly balanced, unlike the drink), and a wonderful bowl of ripe jackfruit swimming in coconut milk. Here’s a great interview with the chef, and this is another great read. Some of the highlights are on sourcing ingredients and employing homechefs in the kitchen. The level of attention to detail on display here is highly unusual, but this isn’t just something to appreciate on an intellectual level. It comes across in the flavors of nearly every dish. Few regional cuisines in India have restaurants this good. With most upscale Indian restaurants in India you are really paying for AC/decor/service/hygiene while eating food that is at best on par with the local places (and that’s pretty rare, it’s far more often than not watered down), so a place serving some of the best representations of the cuisine you’ll find anywhere, with dishes you won’t find anywhere else, is really special. There should be many, many more of these. Why aren’t there? This was even better than any South Indian five star hotel meal that I’ve had, at maybe 30% of the cost.

Bengaluru Oota Company - Something in between a restaurant meal and a home meal, one of the city’s must visit restaurants, and its central location (I guess, if Bangalore has such a thing) gives most people no excuses! Bookings are required 24 hours in advance, the website says to fill out the form but they didn’t respond when I did, it’s better to just call. The setting is an actual home that’s been converted into a restaurant, the food (set menu only) is a mix of Gowda and Mangalorean cuisines made up of family recipes from the co-founders, and the service is among the best you’ll get in India, warm and friendly and highly informative. The food reminded me of what was served at some of the great homestays I went to in Karnataka, except it was 2-3 times as much food as I’d be given in a regular meal, a feast with a well balanced range of starters, mains, and sides, using seasonal ingredients to make regional recipes almost never served at restaurants. Everything we ate was delicious, though note that you may not get many of the same dishes as us. Delicious chutneys and papads (called sandige, which are mysteriously yummier than all papads not called sandige), kosambari (yummier than all other things in the kachumber language family), goli baji, pathrode (a coastal Karnataka version of patrel, I don’t need to tell you that it’s yummier than its culinary cousins, and this was not oily like the one I had in Mangalore), a tendli sabzi where the tendli was just lightly cooked so that it was still crunchy, beetroot sabzi, pumpkin sabzil, akki rotti, a local bean sabzi, some rice dishes, and the highlight, a killer bitter gourd fried in a delicious masala, I believe the only bitter gourd dish I had in Bangalore. Dessert was chiroti (a fried pastry thing) served with poppy seed payasam, and there was also good filter coffee, better than most we had, and they gave us the name of the shop that sold it (Sri Suma, listed in the coffee section above). At 1500 per person (for vegetarians, not sure if it’s more for a non-veg meal) it’s incredibly reasonable, cheap enough that if I lived nearby I would go at least once a season but pricey enough that I wouldn’t get fat by going every day, a good balance (though, to be clear, that was a joke, and other than the sweets and a few fried starters it is all good, wholesome, healthy food, the kind of thing you should eat every day, just not in industrial quantities the way this meal tempts you to do). This is another restaurant that makes me sad there aren’t more restaurants like this.

We also ate at Karavalli, often considered to be Bangalore’s best restaurant. I have to say, I was disappointed. Our food was certainly good/very good, but only one dish out of many really stood out, and it didn’t compare to the other excellent meals I had. Maybe it was an off day, or we didn’t get the right stuff, and also as a vegetarian I’m not able to try many of their top dishes. Our friend who was with us ate a handful of chicken or mutton dishes and he felt it was all outstanding and said it was his favorite meal of the trip. Still, considering this is 2-3 times the cost of the restaurants I’ve listed above, I have a hard time saying it’s worth the splurge, at least for most people. The menu is pan-South Indian with a focus on coastal food. It is a great setting, you feel like you’re eating in an old Mangalorean mansion. Before coming I had asked if they could put together a tasting menu of signature dishes because at over 1000 rupees per dish there was no way I was going a la carte there. This is something that they do, and it comes to around 3-4k per person (depending which menu you choose) for a dozen or so dishes which is a much better proposition for someone who wants to sample a lot (though still by no means cheap). When I got there they said it woud be better instead of the tasting menu to just have them bring out small portions of a bunch of their dishes. I said sure and just left the ordering to them. The tasting menu would have had more dishes, but this came out a fair amount cheaper, around 7k for three people with I think four starters, four mains, and one dessert. Actually not bad at all for a five star hotel, but such meals are only worth it if you’re knocked out, which I wasn’t. The consensus is that this is THE go-to 5-star South Indian restaurant in India, superior to the ITC’s Dakshin (while typically ITC leads the way in food), but I was actually more impressed/satisfied with the one meal at Dakshin I had six years ago (though the best part of the Dakshin meal was the starters, which was the opposite of this meal, and overall I felt that unlike with the ITC’s North Indian restaurants which have the best food of its kind money can buy, the South Indian food you get at the best small local places is better). The starters were oggaraneda aritha pundi (rice dumplings tossed in a coconut masala, and while I liked it, the flavors didn’t jump out, it felt too subdued, maybe they just didn’t get the tempering right?), malabar potato roast (same, good, but the flavors didn’t pop), and a vada (good, but nothing special). My friend loved the Coorg chicken starter but felt the same way we did about the veg starters. One of the mains was a Kerala veg stew, which was good but is never that interesting of a dish to me and I wish I had gotten something else but I guess that’s what I get for not taking charge of the ordering. The other main was a tangy mango curry, which was excellent. Dessert was a delicious tender coconut payasam. Though only a few dishes were really impressive, nothing was oily or unappetizing in any way. So certainly a good meal, and if 3k or so a head is pocket change to you, I recommend it, and it’s likely more worthy of the splurge for those who eat meat and especially seafood, which I think is the real star of the restaurant (rumor has it their ghee roast is world class). I would happily go back and try more of the menu if I could afford it. I’m confident many dishes are top notch and that it’s all at least pretty good, and the menu has a good range of dishes from across the South that are too often unrepresented on menus, and it’s far far better than 95% of five star hotel restaurants. It also helps that it’s centrally located and the only other upscale South Indian restaurant in the area is Bangalore Oota Co which requires advanced bookings, so for well off out of towners looking for an impromptu high end South Indian meal, it is likely the best bet. But still, even putting the money aside, KCK and Bangalore Oota Co. served not just better food but a better experience, with focused set menus that told a story of a cuisine and region, and they both had better service than here. The service was mostly friendly and helpful, but the person serving the dishes gave unenthusiastic and very brief two-word answers to my questions about the dishes being served, never telling me the names of the dishes until I asked even though I asked for every single dish, and there was not a single time anyone refilled our water without asking (oddly I find indifferent service to be a regular thing at India’s five star hotel restaurants?). So I’m sad to say it was a let down.

That was it for the upscale South Indian restaurants we ate at. I can think of two other notable upscale South Indian restaurants that I hope to visit on future trips, but please notify me if I missed any!

One is Podi & Spice in Indiranagar, which I have high expectations for because the co-founder is one of the co-founders of Bangalore Oota Co. We unfortunately tried going on a Monday when they were shut. The chef is a former homechef who specializes in Kerala’s Syrian Christian food, though the menu has many Karnataka dishes as well. Prices look very reasonable (around 300 for veg dishes). It seems a place for a simpler, more humble meal than the feasts I had at the above restaurants, and I can’t say anything on the menu jumps out at me as something so unique and unusual that I absolutely have to try it, but I think it will be a satisfying, good quality meal.

Another standout restaurant that I really want to go to is Oota (no relation to Bangalore Oota), which is in Whitefield, a far from the center tech hub area which I didn’t get a chance to visit (and to be honest I may never visit). Oota is at the same location as and serves the beers of Windmills Brewery (same owners) which is well regarded. The menu is great, spanning Karnataka with a huge number of dishes that hardly ever make it on menus. I changed my mind. The “Mangalore catholic style pan fried spiced green brinjal salad with green chillies, onions and coconut milk, finished with a hint of vinegar” is reason enough for a trip to Whitefield. Next time!

Any others in this category? There was The Permit Room but they’ve shut.

Notable Non-South Indian Restaurants

Bangalore does have a lot of quality restaurants of various cuisines, but how many non-South Indian restaurants are actually worth seeking out for someone visiting the city and looking to maximize for truly unique and special meals that you can’t get anywhere else? Not very many, it seems, but there are a few to consider slotting into your trip, though I mostly didn’t get to them. I personally can’t bring myself to eat, say, ramen in Bangalore (no disrespect to the highly beloved ramen place there), but these are the places that I find exciting and worth my time there even when competing with all of the local options:

The standout to me is Farmlore, which is the only place in the city doing chef’s tasting menus with modern creative cuisine based on local and seasonal ingredients. Unfortunately I did my trip planning last minute and was unable to get a reservation (for weekends it seems you need to book at least a week in advance, if not sooner), but this is top of the list for the next trip. They are near the airport, so planning your flight schedule around a meal there seems like a decent idea.

There is some genuinely creative and ambitious food served at Araku Cafe, which I visited for a work session and meal. They now have a branch in Mumbai too, though I prefer the more spacious Bangalore location (I guess I can sum up the difference in food scenes between Mumbai and Bangalore in that Araku really stands out in Bangalore but doesn’t stand out as much in Mumbai). It is a very nice cafe, among the nicest in India, and despite the coffee focus the food is a star and goes beyond the typical comfort food menus that cafes typically serve (the chef previously worked at Masque, and the experience shows). The meal we had there was a bit of a mixed bag, but overall it was good enough and with enough great touches and an attention to local, seasonal ingredients that I feel comfortable recommending it, and I would love to go back and try more of the menu. Personally I’d focus on local food before going here, but since it’s a great place to work and has interesting food, it’s noteworthy for us remote workers. The highlight was a wonderful beetroot dish with beets cooked three ways, with a bruleed beet mousse served with beetroot chips and a salad with pickled beetroots. Really exceptional stuff. We also got blistered beans in a brown butter sauce which were good if a bit rich for me. Where the meal faltered was a burrata dish served with a sourdough waffle, quinoa tabbouleh, a homemade tahini sauce, and sun dried tomatoes. It sounded great but we actually sent it back because the burrata was hard. They made us a new one which was definitely better, but the burrata was still not very soft or creamy, and honestly I should have sent it back again but I felt bad. Beyond the burrata quality (which I’m willing to grant may have been a weird outlier), the dish itself was oddly conceived. The combination of tahini and burrata sounded good but was excessively rich (obvious in retrospect, but you don’t know until you try it!), the small bowl the dish was served in meant everything mixed together which made you eat the quinoa and the waffle in the same bite which isn’t ideal, and some of the sun dried tomatoes were hard and unable to give the dish some much needed brightness. Considering how good all of the food on the menu sounded, it was especially painful wasting our limited stomach space on this cursed dish. The desserts all sounded amazing, and it was hard to narrow down our choice. We went with a chocolate and sun dried tomato cookie, which was less interesting than it sounded but still very good, with the sun dried tomatoes tasting a bit like cranberries. On a return visit we got the cold pressed mustard oil and chocolate cake, which the staff promised had a strong mustard taste. I am sad to report I tasted no mustard oil in the cake. A disappointment, certainly, but thankfully the cake was excellent, among the best slices I’ve had in India. I’d describe it as a soft, moist tea cake studded with bits of chocolate and topped with a delicate, mildly sweet whipped milk frosting (the word frosting itself makes my tongue convulse at the thought of all of the grossly sweet and stodgy frostings I’ve endured, but this was a delight). The other desserts sound more interesting and hopefully live up to how they sound. There was a sensational sounding dessert which involves pickled rose and rose brine, I tried ordering it but they were sold out that day. I had a very well crafted tiramisu croissant at their Mumbai branch. From what I tried but the pastry team clearly knows its stuff, and the sugar levels were always well balanced. I do wonder about the case of the missing mustard oil, though.

One other chef driven place I wanted to try but didn’t get around to was Lupa. I’ve read many times that Manu Chandra is one of India’s finest chefs but his food was only ever available in chains which were only ever pretty good at best. Now he has his own flagship restaurant, I believe broadly Mediterranean inspired food but with a use of local ingredients and enough creative touches that it seems worthwhile. There’s also Navu Project which I’ve heard for years is great, but they were only doing popups when I was there. Now it’s a full fledged restaurant doing creative food with local ingredients. Both of these are on my list for next time.

There is also a lot of non-South Indian regional cuisine found in Bangalore, most doesn’t seem so remarkable that out of towners should visit but two standouts for me are Sarposh, serving Kashmiri food, and Khanposh, serving Awadhi food, both from the same owners. Unfortunately, the day I tried going to at least one of them they were closed for an Eid holiday. I’ve heard great things about both (here’s a great writeup on Sarposh, the unusually high level of detail and care that goes into the food is evident, the same blog has a good piece on Khanposh as well). Kashmiri food is a favorite of mine and there are very few good Kashmiri restaurants anywhere (I realize as a vegetarian I am limited in my ability to judge the restaurants, but in Kashmir I ate extraordinary food at people’s houses but was disappointed with the restaurants), and refined Awadhi food is hard to find outside of hotels where the prices are exorbitant (and as I understand it the focus at Khanposh is more homestyle), so both of these restaurants stand out as places that actually seem fairly unique to Bangalore.
I rarely go for “Asian” food in India but I really want to go to Kopitiam Lah, a Malaysian place inspired by Southeast Asian kopitiams with a menu made in collaboration with Lavonne, the Bangalore based pastry school which is probably the best in India and has a Malaysian woman on the team who is taking a leading role at the restaurant, and chef Darren Teoh, one of the top chefs in Malaysia whose restaurant Dewakan was, as I understand it, a pioneer in high end restaurants using local ingredients in creative ways (and it was the country’s first restaurant to get two Michelin stars). I have no idea when I’ll eat there, so I’d totally go to what I believe is his only casual restaurant. More importantly for me, though, is that even if I went to Malaysia I’m not sure I’d have access to most of these dishes in a vegetarian format! So I’m pretty excited to check this out whenever I go back.

Anything I left out? Ice cream shops that have interesting local flavors? High end pizzerias with paneer ghee roast pizza? (Juuuuust kidding! Or am I?)

For further food recommendations, I thought these guides on Enthucutlet looked good, as did some guy’s personal list on his blog, a medium of publication I greatly respect. The best person to follow for up to date recommendations is Anirban Blah, who posts regularly on Instagram, but unfortunately it’s not searchable by city. You can search through his blog where he posts less frequently, which suggests that the blog posts are on meals he most wishes to highlight.

I usually write about cafes to work from but we mostly only went to ones that looked spacious and were conveniently located for where we were going, so as a result we went to a lot of chains and I don’t feel like mentioning chains. Other than the chains, Araku, Humble Bean, and Nerlu were all very nice. Sour House was maybe too small to work from but they have homemade kefir so it’s recommended. There are countless others, you’ll find them.

Cinema

Bangalore’s single screen cinemas aren’t as grand and beautiful as in other cities, but many seem quite nice to see movies in. It’s South India, so many have 4k laser projectors and Dolby Atmos and whatnot. I didn’t have time to see a full movie, but I did buy a ticket and check out the Urvashi cinema for 15 minutes and it was quite nice, good projection and sound, way better than any Mumbai single screen, I would love to see a movie there! Bangalore also has India’s largest LED screen at the Swagath cinema (14 meters, not huge but bigger than Mumbai’s 10 meter screen, I regrettably didn’t get a chance to go). As everyone knows, LED screens are the best screens, and there are far too few of them, and they unfortunately tend to be on the smaller side, so this is a major feather in the cap for Bangalore.

Off the top of my head I’ve only seen two movies set in Bangalore, neither of which I recommend (the Kannada film U-Turn and Malayalam film Bangalore Days).

Sam Mendelsohn — Travel Guides & More