Draavin Canteen opened in Lajpat Nagar in Delhi a couple of years ago under the name Dakshin Canteen and quickly made a name for their South Indian menu featuring both vegetarian and non-vegetarian food. I read a number of enticing reviews etc. of it online but never managed to make it there. In the second half of last year, however, they opened a branch in Gurgaon, which has been my home base in the Delhi NCR (National Capital Region) since late-2021. With the new location a mere 20 minutes away from my parents’ flat, finding people to go eat there together with became a much easier proposition. And so on my trip in December it was high on my list. I descended on them in a party of five for lunch a few days after arrival. My expectations were high and I’m sorry to say they weren’t quite met. Here are some details.

The Gurgaon branch is located in DLF Downtown, one of the many depressing corporate tower complexes that dot the city. I’m assuming they do a lot of business at lunch on weekdays when the offices are full but this was not the case on the Saturday that we were there. Only a couple of other tables were occupied while we were there. It’s not a small restaurant: there’s a fair bit of patio seating and quite a few tables in the attractive dining room inside. We didn’t want to eat while breathing Gurgaon’s winter air and so headed inside. Here we encountered a different problem: some sort of loud exhaust system that made it feel like we were eating in a vibrating DC-10 whose best years were decades behind it. We managed to move to a table where we seemed less likely to develop headaches and got around to ordering.

The menu is quite extensive and covers most of South India with some dishes from Sri Lanka for good measure. The 18 starters/small plates are divided equally into vegetarian and meat/fish offerings. We got one from the former section and three from the latter. From the first category came the chilli-cheese paniyaram, which was tasty enough. From the meaty end of the menu came the Kerala mutton cutlet, mutton pepper fry and inji-puli chicken wings (chicken wings with a sweet-spicy tamarind-ginger chutney slathered on them). All of these were quite good, though it took a while to receive the Malabar porotta we’d ordered to eat the pepper fry with.

The larger dishes were less successful. These included a ghee roast chicken set dosa, mutte/egg roast, Kozhikoddan chicken kari (with appam), and Chettinad green masala fish. I’m not sure if shredded ghee roast chicken smeared over a set dosa is a popular thing in Mangalore but this one just made me wish I was eating a proper ghee roast chicken with a porotta. The Kerala-style chicken curry was decent but nothing to get excited about; the appam it came with was, however, mediocre. The green masala fish didn’t do very much more for us: the fish was both not very fresh and over-cooked. The only dish we liked a lot from this set was the egg roast.

Having ordered and eaten a lot of food for five people, we passed on dessert, which seemed to be more on the mod end of things: a Sri Lankan cheesecake, tres leches payasam etc.

For a look at the restaurant, the menu and what we ate, launch the slideshow below. Scroll down to see how much it all cost and for some more thoughts on the meal.

The total, with included 10% service charge, was Rs. 5809 or just about $65. That’s not a cheap meal in Delhi/Gurgaon but it’s not outrageous either for what we ate. The bigger issue is that while what we ate would have been very good and novel in Delhi several years ago, before the wider range of South Indian cuisines became available there, there’s nothing very remarkable about it in 2025/26. I couldn’t say that there was a single thing we ate that I am in a hurry to go back and eat again. Things may be much better at the original location but given all the acclaim it has received, I was expecting quite a bit better. Well, since this meal more than six months ago yet another South Indian place that opened in Gurgaon late last year and has received strong reviews has flashed on my long-distance radar: Hosa. I might try that on my next trip.

Alright, next up in my frantic restaurant report catch-up: another meal eaten in the Twin Cities in February. That’ll go up on Wednesday.