Some meals demand a reservation, while others demand that you survive the drive. By the time I crawled through the Friday evening madness from Noida to Gurugram last week, Delhi had already taken its pound of flesh. The traffic had drained every ounce of patience I possessed, leaving me with only one thing intact: an almost feral hunger. It turned out to be the perfect way to meet Chettinad.
“These are flavours that Delhi is not so familiar with and I wanted to bring them here in the most traditional way,” chef Ruchira Hoon said as banana leaves were unfurled across the tables at Draveen Canteen. The meal was also a prelude to something larger. Hoon is curating the culinary programme for the upcoming Chettinad Heritage and Cultural Festival at The Bangala in Karaikudi. This pop-up, bringing the family behind one of Chettinad’s most celebrated heritage institutions to Delhi NCR, felt like an invitation to the festival long before one had set foot in Tamil Nadu.
Delhi has a habit of convincing itself it has tasted every corner of India. We pride ourselves on our Kashmiri wazwan, our Assamese thalis, our Manipuri cafés and our endless parade of regional pop ups. Then a meal like this reminds you how gloriously incomplete your map really is!
Before the first morsel arrived, I found myself speaking with Sivagami Subbiah, daughter-in-law of Meenakshi Meyyappan—affectionately known as Aachi, the formidable woman behind The Bangala in Karaikudi. There was no performative nostalgia, no polished script. “I learnt everything from my mother-in-law,” she smiled. “I am only carrying our family’s food forward.”
Panakam first, cool and spiced against the relentless summer outside. Soon the banana leaf transformed into a landscape of colours and textures. Ridge gourd kootu sat beside beans usili. Mango pachadi flirted between sweetness and sharpness. Potato masala offered comfort while snake gourd fritters disappeared embarrassingly quickly. Then came a capsicum peanut mandi, smoky, nutty and entirely unfamiliar—one of those rare dishes that makes you stop talking because your brain is trying to understand what your tongue has already fallen in love with. Even my husband who otherwise never eats capsicum wiped his serving clean.
The vathal kuzhambu arrived with all the swagger of a dish that knows exactly who it is. Rich red, deeply spiced, unapologetically sour and fiery, it clung to the rice with remarkable conviction. The jackfruit biryani, made with fragrant short-grain rice rather than the long-grained extravagance most of us associate with biryani, felt almost understated until the butter bean kurma rounded every edge with quiet richness. Nothing on that banana leaf felt accidental and as we ate, Sivagami explained why.
The Chettiars were traders before they were anything else. Their ships travelled to Burma, Malaya, Singapore and Vietnam. The men sailed. The women stayed behind, receiving unfamiliar ingredients and making sense of them in kitchens that became laboratories long before anyone romanticised the word. Chettinad’s food carries the memory of those voyages without ever abandoning its Tamil soul.
Perhaps that is what struck me most. This was never a cuisine chasing novelty. It had been global long before global became fashionable.
For a few hours in Gurugram, with the Delhi skyline only a short drive away, I found myself eating not simply from a banana leaf but from centuries of trade routes, family recipes and women’s invisible labour.