One of the great things about living in Malaysia is that I can eat Indian food anytime without worrying about making a big hole in my pocket.
I still vividly remember when I traveled to India for about 5 months in 2004, 18 years ago.
I have very fond memories of this trip and was fortunate to experience all the wonderful Indian culinary delights, from the rich Bengali dishes in Kolkata, to the South Indian delicacies of Tamil Nadu, the delicious meaty Hyderabad biriyanis, and finally the famous Punjabi cuisine in the north-west.
I travelled across one of the largest countries in the world, from east to west, south to north, and between bigger cities, I got off the shabby, cheap and slow train as much as possible at each intermediate station to experience the life of locals, nature, food,…
So, I went not only to mega big cities such as Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, or famous city like, Varanasi and Goa in India that everyone knows, but also many small and medium-sized cities and many unknown small towns.
So, there, I was able to witness warm hearted Indian’s humble life, to taste a variety of very delicious local foods of the simple and compassionate Indians.
As such, I have memories of my nostalgic trip to India, so it is natural that I have a deep love for Indian food. Now, happily I can say that I am benefiting from the food culture because the third generation Indians from Tamil, India have settled in Malaysia.
Honestly speaking, as a Korean if I didn’t go to some decent Indian restaurants in Korea, I couldn’t have Indian food properly without worrying about my pocket.
On the other hand, in Malaysia, where I have been living for more than 12 years, there are a lot of local Indian mamak restaurants. So whenever I crave Indian food, I am happy to be able to eat the Indian food I want to eat comfortably.
Indian Mamak Restaurant sells Islamic Indian food, so there is no pork. And there are Indian style breads variation such as chapati, naan, paratha, and roti, and main dishes like soups, biryani, chicken curry, and fish, mutton, and beef, and many typical vegetables.
Well, the delicious Indian food that I am writing on my blog today is vegetarian Indian food that anyone can enjoy, regardless of whether they are Muslim or Hindu.
Saravana Bhavan, which started in Chennai in 1981, the famous capital of South India and has grown into a very large company, is an Indian restaurant that only serves vegetarian food.
Now it opened branches in various continents outside India. For example, it has already opened nearly 70 restaurants in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, America, and Oceania, and if you add up to 30 something restaurants in India alone, it is a huge restaurant company with nearly 100 restaurant outlets.
As I write, the first thing I want to say is, for Indian food lovers like me, if there is a branch nearby, why not go and try it! Whether it’s Saravana Bhavan in Malaysia, Singapore, or the Middle East, the taste is almost the same, and the prices of food at branches in these Asian countries are not much different.
After all, for many Indian expatriates living abroad, it is so important that they satisfy their nostalgia for the food they had in their home country as authentically as possible. And the good thing is that Saravana Bhavan’s food in Southeast Asia is undeniably reasonably priced.
In addition, the vegetarian foods of Saravana Bhavan, sold in western countries such as London, New York and Paris like expensive cities, retain their original taste and aroma and are almost the same, but the prices are not at all similar.
Because it is located in a place where land price is high, you can see that the menu price is almost 20 times higher than that in Asia.
So, even considering the vegetarian menu, the restaurant is decorated with all kinds of antiques to create an original and elegant interior atmosphere, so you have to spend a lot of money for a vegetarian Indian meal. In other words, you will have to worry about your pockets.
From my own experience, when I went to New York in early January 2020, just before the Covid-19 outbreak, I purposely walked through an area of ??Manhattan called “Curry Hill”. At that time, I also passed by a restaurant Saravana Bhavan, and I could see the exterior and interior of a really elegant atmosphere at a glance.
Then, as I flipped through the menu book placed outside, I noticed obviously the menu price was really expensive compared to that in Asia. For example, appetizer items such as samosa, pokora, vadi, chaat, and dal soup costs more than $10 USD(RM40).
And, the main courses like vegetarian thali sets or masala curry variation with paneer called Indian cottage cheese or palak(spinach), gobi(cauliflower), aloo curry, chana masala (chickpea) will set you back over US$20 (RM80) each.
After paying the mandatory tip in the USA, it will cost you almost 25 times the price of the same meal you would get in Malaysia.????
After all, I’m happy once again that I can go to Saravana Bhavan, Malaysia, where I live, and enjoy delicious South Indian cuisine at an affordable price anytime.
In Malaysia, I read that there are six branches all over Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, and the Petaling Jaya region, which is KL’s outskirts, simply called Selangor.
The Saravana Bhavan Restaurant I’ve been to a lot in Kuala Lumpur is in Bangsar, a trendy, slightly upscale neighborhood with lots of bars, bakeries and European bistros and restaurants. I used to go there every Thursday evening for a late Indian dinner after my language class.
It was before Covid 19, and it has been quite a while since the last time I went to Bangsar because the language school is now conducting online zoom instead of offline classes due to social distancing measure.
And during the Corona period, I went for a late lunch after hiking with my Indian friend Sonia. What surprised me at the time was that she was half-Indian but had never heard of or knew anything about this restaurant.
So I was very happy to show her real vegetarian Indian food cooked by Indian people from Tamil state in India. And luckily, she enjoyed the food as much as I did.
To be honest, not all of the chefs here are from Tamil, but the original taste and aroma of the food still maintains the identity of South India. After all that, I can say that I have been to this particular Sarabavan Barban Bangsar branch countless times.
And I also remember I went to Brickfield Branch with Raj and Deekshita couple who came to Malaysia from Kerala, India. So I went to this restaurant a lot.
From here on, let’s talk a little bit more about tiffin-style Indian food, often referred to as vegetarian food in India. First of all, if I have to list my favorite foods here, the first is a very moist and fluffy idli for RM5.5(US$1.2) served with two delicious coconut chutneys, sesame paste, and peppery and sourish tomato-based rasam and a bit of veggie pickle.
Basically, when you order an idli set, you get two idli that are somewhat snowy white and cutely round. One size is half the size of the palm of your hand, so eating two can give your stomach a little bit of relief.
There are a few chutneys that are eaten with the idli, so the amount is not as small as it looks. From a nutritional point of view, idli is steamed using rice flour, not wheat flour like naan, chapati, puri, paratha, etc. So idli is the healthiest non-oily tiffin food in India. Not surprisingly, almost all tiffin food in India is deep fried or stir fried, and eventually everything is made, coated or soaked with a huge amount of oil.
When making a decision based on taste without thinking about health, the Indian tiffin item that always captures my heart is always a dosa. I think most people will like dosa as much as I do, and I think the fact that there are countless dosa variations on the menu, yet only one idli set, is proof of this.
Dosa is made by mixing rice and lentils called garam in an appropriate ratio, adding water, and spreading it out on a hot plate with a diameter of 30 cm. It can be rolled into a cylindrical shape, can be folded into a triangular shape, or can be folded into a half-moon shape, so there are various folding shapes which is totally depending on who is making.
And because dosa dough mixed with rice and lentils is usually made the day before and fermented overnight, it is an Asian crepe-style snack with good nutrients such as vitamins and protein.
If you look closely at the Saravana Bhavan menu, more than 20 dosa items cover almost the two whole pages. For example, there are plain dosa, masala dosa with rough mashed potato chunks flavoured with masala spice, cheese dosa, lava (semolina) dosa, onion dosa, egg dosa, spinach dosa, beetroot dosa, etc. The prices are really cheap, ranging from RM4 (US$1) to RM8 (US$2).
That said, I liked idli and dosa so much that I went to Saravana Bhavan Restaurant. In addition to idli and dosa items, Saravana Bhavan also has many other tiffin items such as poori, chapati, pakora, vadi, samosa, and chaat. Basically, the vegetarian menu book seems thicker than my thumb nail, so it’s not easy to check all the pages. ????
When you look at the typical main meal that isn’t tiffin at most South Indian restaurants, you can’t go wrong with the thali set. The thali set is served on a round stainless steel plate with a diameter of 30 cm, and a variety of Indian vegetables and curries are placed around the edge of the plate in more than ten small stainless steel bowls.
In the middle, white Indian steamed rice, or chapati, is served, along with a salty and crispy Indian crisp called Pappudum.
In terms of food, there are white coconut chutney, mint chutney, rasam with tomato base and tamarind sour taste, and daal(lentil) soup, which is essential to Indian cuisine.
And if you look at the vegetables, there are typical Indian vegetables such as petola, which is similar to winter melon. And cucumbers, cabbage, cauliflower dishes often used in Indian cuisine, gobi and potato dishes are almost always served. Of course, the vegetable dish changes from day to day.
And there are sour yogurt drink called raita, which are good to accompany with curry or other flavourful spice packed dishes.
For dessert, halwa, usually made with carrots, or round and very sweet ladoo variations or gulab jamun can be served in the thali set. However, Kulpi, an Indian-style ice cream, is usually sold separately.
Saravana Bhavan’s thali sets start at around RM10. This is a little over $2 in US dollars, but in New York you are expected to pay around $18 ~ $20, so the price difference is almost tenfold.
To make matters worse, in the US, if you include tips, the menu can be said to be easily 10 times more expensive than in Malaysia as it is an expensive city even if the menu contains almost the same items.
So every time I eat this delicious Indian vegetarian food, which I can get in Malaysia for about $2, I really appreciate it and it puts my mind at ease because it seems to taste so much better.
If you order a stainless steel thali set from Saravana Bhavan, clean banana leaves are placed on the table separately.
Usually, when eating at Mamak, a banana leaf is spread and a staff member comes and puts rice and 3-4 side dishes on the leaf in turn. Then pour the three kinds of daily curry liquid over the white rice and let it overflow all over the banana leaves.
However, unlike Mamak, here, customers can directly transfer the amount they want to eat from the thali set to the banana leaf with a spoon or hand and place it on their own. Therefore, there is no need to worry about the curry liquid overflowing.
Also, at Mamak Restaurant, banana leaf menu is usually only available during lunch time.
However, it is good to be able to eat all day in Sarabana bhavan, and even if you eat banana leaf in the evening, you can enjoy the quality taste of vegetable dishes and various curries without any problem.
That is because it wouldn’t be too difficult to make and maintain daily vegetable items and various chutney items for a variety of tiffins and banana leaves.
The reason is that in non-vegetarian Indian restaurants with meat, the right chef has to prepare and serve a la carte curry dish of certain meats every time a customer places an order.
Therefore, the cost of labor for the chef will be high, and maintaining the freshness of the meat will be a problem. Simply put, vegetarian restaurant Saravana Bhavan, on the other hand, has absolutely no worries about providing the right meat texture for a rich curry with meat.
Instead, they would prepare and do almost the same with the various vegetables and typical curry items served on thali or banana leaves.
Also, from the customer’s point of view, one of the good things about banana leaves is that if you run out of rice, side dishes, or curry liquid, you can ask for a little more.
Then, the staff can bring more from already prepared vegetables and curry, rather than making a new one for us.
We had lunch with banana leaves around 1pm. And around 3 o’clock I had followed an Indian couple to Nu Sentral Mall, right next to Kuala Lumpur Sentral station. There, Raji’s wife, Deekshita, had her eyebrows trimmed at a store specializing in eyebrow threading.
It was very interesting and fun to see her eyebrows being trimmed with the thread that I saw in front of my eyes for the first 20 minutes or so.
Then, around 4 o’clock, I said goodbye and went to Sam’s Grocery in the basement of the same shopping mall to buy my favorite guava fruit.
Then I had a cup of coffee at Sam’s Cafe inside the supermarket, which sells a variety of hot meat dishes of the day and delicious freshly baked Danish chocolate pastries and rolls.
I was very full with the Indian thali set for lunch earlier. But I still remember I couldn’t resist the temptation of my favorite Danish pastry. ????????
After Sam’s Cafe, I had to digest a lot of the food I ate that day, so I went window shopping at a few clothing stores in the NU Shopping Mall.
Unfortunately, it started to rain while waiting for the bus to go home around 8pm. The problem was that the bus didn’t come for more than 30 minutes and it rained heavily so I had to avoid the rain.
What’s even funnier is that I had no choice but to go to the Indian Mamak restaurant near the bus stop.
It’s a fairly clean and bright Indian restaurant called ABC Bistro that I go to when I’m near KL Sentral Station.
In the end, while talking to the one of the staff there, using the low price of mamak food as an excuse, I ended up ordering Dosa, tandoori chicken, and Indian black coffee(kopi kosong).????
Even considering that I am a fit foodie, that day is remembered as a day when I ate too much food in a short period of time. ???? To be honest, I love my cheat day. So, what could be more fun in life without those unexpected cheat days? ????
Check out Saravana Bhavan’s various tiffin items and banana leaves through my videos here! And if you find this restaurant nearby, try the delicious South Indian vegetarian food. I think you’ll come more often for freshly made tiffins and vegetables, as well as a variety of coconut chutneys and curry.
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