I only went to Udupi to eat at the temple, which was a bucket list thing to do.
Oddly enough, Udupi was one of the first places in India I ever heard of outside a few of the megacities. My introduction to South Indian food was at Udupi restaurant in Phoenix, Arizona over 15 years ago. Maybe it had no connection to actual Udupi cuisine which is true of most “Udupi” restaurants, but it was the first time I had any inkling that some Indians ate things other than naan and palak paneer and whatnot. Very embarrassing, and of course I’ve come a long way since then. My journey has taken me to the point where there is no restaurant in the world I have eaten more times at than A. Rama Nayak's Udipi Shri Krishna Boarding in Matunga, so going to the source was a must.
Is that the only reason to go to Udupi if you don’t have any spiritual connection to the place? Is it worth it? Should you go? The answer to all of these questions is maybe. I’m definitely glad I went and I would recommend it as part of a larger trip to places nearby (Mangalore and elsewhere). It’s definitely worth the drive from Mangalore. But I wouldn’t say it’s so interesting that you absolutely must go. But if you do end up there for a day or two, you’ll have a great time and eat excellent food!
We also saw the neighboring Manipal (which has the Hasta Shilpa Heritage Village, one of India’s best museums!) and we went to Kundapur to eat at Shetty Lunch Home on the drive in, more on those below.
We stayed at Shree Homestay in Manipal for two nights in February 2023. It’s nice, clean, comfortable, reasonably priced (around 2k inr a night), it has AC (the room gets brutally hot in the afternoon otherwise), the family that runs it is very nice (they even invited us join them at a get together at their home), and they serve good homemade food if requested in advance. I recommend it, though the location is about a 20 minute drive to Udupi, so you may want to stay closer by. But the Manipal area is fairly nice too.
Beyond the stuff I did, people enjoy going to the beaches nearby and seeing the very striking rock formations on St. Mary’s Island (where apparently Madagascar was once attached and also where Vasco da Gama stopped on the way to Calicut). It seemed nice but not that interesting and I didn’t feel like running around too much in the heat.
Udupi
In Udupi, the main attraction is obviously the temple, and the main attraction for me is definitely the food. If you plan to go, it is of the utmost importance that you get a VIP pass! If not, you will be ushered into the large dining hall where you are served just rice, sambar, and rasam on a plate and you will not receive the full banana leaf meal! To get the pass, go to the temple entrance (there’s a long line of people waiting to enter at lunch time, just follow that line to the front near where the chariots are) and look for an opening to the right of the main temple entrance, I believe it says “Seva” on a sign. Inside you make a donation, you pay what you want, we paid 500 inr (250 per person). I’m not sure if there’s some minimum where they don’t give you the full banana leaf thali because you’re a cheapskate. Best not to test it. Anyway, its worth more than what I paid and I’ll pay more next time.
They give you a receipt that gets you entrance into a different dining hall which you will find beyond the main temple in the courtyard to the left (non VIP peasants eat upstairs, and if you’re a Brahmin there’s yet another eating area right below the peasant section). You can also get free prasad with the pass, when we went it was [I wrote this roughly a year and a half before publishing and now that I’m editing it I see that the sentence just trailed off. I have no idea what the prasad was.]
The meal was obviously sensational. There was rice, pumpkin sambar, rasam, chutney, sprouted dal and coconut salad, plus payasam and buttermilk. The pumpkin sambar was the shining star of the meal but it was all great. It was very special to experience and I hope to return one day, or at least have more temple meals elswhere.
I feel kind of weird that I am just writing about the food when really this is a spiritual place that has deeper meaning to people. I hope nobody minds. I am a little insecure about this. Probably most people who read this blog are doing so just for the food recommendations, so maybe it’s okay with this crowd. (I guess it’s interesting that I feel there’s something slightly disrespectful about going primarily for food, though I usually go to religious sites for some combination of architecture, atmosphere, and historical significance, and there’s no reason I should feel shame about going for food but not about going for those other non-spiritual reasons.)
Other than the meal, the temple and the neighboring temples are nice and have some interesting architecture. I liked petting the cows who live at the temple. I especially liked the ship-shaped Ananteshwar Temple. Walk around in the lanes by the temple, there are some very cool buildings. I don’t know what to call it, but I like Temple Town Architecture, an underrated style, it reminds me of frontier towns from old westerns, but it’s distinctly Indian. Keep an eye out for the vegetable vendors, they had some interesting stuff like a local eggplant variety, a very long, pale okra variety, and some things I couldn’t identify.
You should also eat at Mitra Samaj, there are a few places with the same name so make sure you go to the right one. Look for the old sign. Come either for breakfast or evening snacks, or both, they have different items depending on the time of day. We went around 5pm and got goli baji (the highlight, soft and fluffy, fried in coconut oil, after this I didn’t try goli baji anywhere else because I knew it wouldn’t be as good), biscuit roti (like a local version of a kachori, better than any I had in Mangalore, or maybe it was just a case where the first was the best psychologically), pineapple sheera (it was fine, but I’m not much of a sheera fan), plus filter coffee (I don’t recall how it was), mango rasayana (like drinking mango pulp), and kashaya (a spiced herbal tea, like kadha, we requested it without sugar and they informed us that it wouldn’t be good without sugar…and it wasn’t, so if you don’t want sugar I say don’t bother). They unfortunately didn’t have the jackfruit fritters that day. I suspect everything is good, I would love to go back and try the Mangalore buns as well as idli, dosa, etc. Some people say they invented the masala dosa but let’s be honest it’s not rocket science to come up with the idea of eating dosa with a potato sabzi.
Since we visited the temple in the afternoon and wanted to walk around later when it wasn’t so hot, we went for an AC coffee break at Woodlands (very good filter coffee, and nearby is a shop called Laxmi which sells filter coffee powder but they are closed Sundays), and then to the Kediyoor Hotel which has a microbrewery (my wife enjoyed the beer, I enjoyed the AC, kinda weird this is in a temple town though). I forgot the name but not far from there, somewhere on the main road, I went to a surprisingly decent bookstore.
To learn more about Udupi cuisine, this is a good read:
“The devout believed that Krishna would wander away unless he was enticed to stay by delicious eats. This belief resulted in the ‘naivedya’, where cooked delicacies — no fewer than 14 different varieties — are offered to the Lord every day. Gradually, temple authorities also cultivated the tradition of feeding the devotees who thronged the temple on a daily basis.”
“So entwined with the temple is the tradition of Udupi cooking that even the vegetables used are chosen according to a rigorous system laid down by priests. Onion and garlic are taboo for their tamasic qualities. Vegetables such as gherkin, spinach and drumsticks too are not included. Later, ‘English’ vegetables were also deemed unfit to be offered to the gods and by extension unfit for everyday cooking — no tomato, cauliflower, beetroot, radish, carrot or papaya.
Instead, within the strict satvic boundaries, these chefs devised signature dishes that till today typify Udupi food. But there’s none as scrumptious as the variety of dishes fashioned around the matti gulla, a squat greenish brinjal that grows only in the hamlet of Matti. Cooks who hail primarily from a sect of Brahmins from the village of Shivalli turn out a range of matti gulla delicacies. The sliced gulla is soaked in water till the water turns black and the vegetable takes on a fresher aspect. It is then stuffed with a ground mixture of a little coconut, methi, jeera, red chilli, tamarind and salt. When lightly fried, the gulla glistens in a cloud of aromatic spices.
Rituals and cooking were clearly the twin skill sets of the Udupi Brahmins. Once they found employment opportunities at the temple complex dwindling, they signed on as cooks at private homes or made their way to Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai and the towns of Maharashtra.”
That’s apparently the origin of the spread of Udupi restaurants, but why did opportunities dwindle at the temple? Did the temple have to downsize for some reason? Was there a big growth period in the amount of people the temple served, which led to a prolonged hiring spree, and then it plateaued and there was a glut of unemployed chefs who put in time training for the job, a temple cook version of the elite overproduction theory? I’m really fascinated by this.
Also, one of the best things I read on Udupi was in the third chapter of the book Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore. There are only a few pages on the subject, but it's definitely worth a read (in an otherwise just okay book).
A printout at Mumbai’s A. Rama Nayak's Udipi Shri Krishna Boarding (one of the dozen or so truly great restaurants in the city) suggests the Udupi food connection goes back to the time of the Mahabharata. Sure, why not?
Manipal
University town hardly 10 minutes away from Udupi by car. I had heard of it but before going I embarrassingly thought it was in the northeast of India. It is a fairly nice and modern area, fun to see/drive through. We didn’t spend much time there, but it’s got enough nice-ish stuff that you don’t feel so isolated from the world when you visit Udupi, the way you might when you visit other temple towns. I like feeling isolated though.
The main point of interest for tourists here is the terrific Hasta Shilpa Heritage Village which I dare say is one of India’s best museums! Plan for at least two hours, and go in the morning right when they open otherwise it will be too hot. It’s a series of over 20 buildings, primarily houses and temples, that have been lovingly restored and placed into an open air museum, and they give you a PDF guide to read along while exploring.
You get to see a range of architectural styles dating from the early 13th century to early 20th century, and even though these buildings are all from a relatively small cluster of the country (I believe nearly all are from Karnataka), you still get a sense of India’s vast diversity as well as its cultural richness. Some of them are truly dazzling, and I’m extremely grateful to see them being so well preserved.
Some favorites include:
The “Kamal Mahal of Kukanoor” from 1341 (!) which is supposedly the only surviving pre-Vijayanagar era wooden building.
The 1912 “Deccani Nawab Mahal” which feels like a Nawab was put in charge of designing a ski lodge.
A series of local wooden deities.
The homes of coastal port traders which help bring this region to life. From the PDF guide from the 1825 Hungaracuuta Bansale Mane: This particular structure comes from Hungarcutta, a bustling port town which lost its relevance after the construction of bridges across rivers and laying of highways. Till then trade was carried out on waterways with a variety of agricultural produce like rice, spices, salt etc. being collected from inland villages and transported by boats through river ways to these coastal trading houses. It was then shipped through the sea route by large wooden sail ships to various port towns along the western coast of India and also the middleeast.
The 16th century Veera Shaiva Jungama Mutt.
I also loved the range of artwork on display in some of the buildings (primarily in the Kamal Mahal and Harkur Olagina Mane) and the tribal masks from Chattisgarh. Everything is worth seeing, and being able to see these buildings and the many artifacts inside of them is so much better than simply seeing the artifacts on display at a museum. Highly recommended!
We also sought out the food museum, which got a lot of press when it opened, and there are signs nearby advertising it, so I was expecting… a museum… that people could visit? It turns out to be very difficult to visit, first the security guard questions why you are there and why you want to visit it, then you must seek permission from the school principal in another building who also questions why you want to see it. (I don’t know, maybe because there are a ton of signs for it and articles about it talking about how great it is?) Anyway, it’s not a full fledged museum, more of a mini gallery of cookware on display in a small area next to the stairway on two floors at the culinary school. Some very nice items, but it’s definitely not big enough to warrant a visit. The articles about it feel like PR for the school.
Kundapur / Shetty Lunch Home
We came to Udupi driving south from the amazing Gundi Mane homestay, and Kundapur was on the way. If coming or going in this direction, definitely stop in Kundapur to eat at Shetty Lunch Home, often regarded as the inventor of ghee roast and the best one ever. We got the paneer and mushroom ghee roast (I preferred the paneer, not much else is worth trying for vegetarians though there are likely other great dishes for fish/meat eaters), excellent stuff, up there with the best I’ve had though I wouldn’t say it is far and away better than the other top ones I’ve had. Some people make a pilgrimage all the way here just to eat the ghee roast, I wouldn’t say that’s necessary (at least for a vegetarian), but it’s certainly worth a detour. Also in Kundapur, we get some great filter coffee powder from a shop we saw while driving with a sign that says “Filter Coffee” (I forgot the actual name of the place) that I can’t find on Google maps. Look out for the sign! There’s some nice architecture in the town as well.
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