The first thing you learn when you begin to explore the cuisines of India’s heterogeneous regions is how little you know about Indian food. This is true even if you already know that you know very little about Indian food: you discover that you know even less than you thought you did. The other thing you learn is how relatively meaningless the terms we use to describe Indian regions are. Going from talking about “Indian” cuisine to talking about “North Indian” or “South Indian” or “North East Indian” cuisines is progress but barely begins to scratch the surface. Drilling down from South Indian to Tamil, for example, may seem like a great deal of granularity but, again, the foods of different Tamil communities, sliced by religion, caste, tribe, sub-region etc. can differ widely from each other. I knew all this, so you might think me very well informed. And so I am happy to tell you that in April I ate an extensive meal featuring the food of a community from the Nilgiris in western Tamil Nadu that I had not even heard of before: the Badagas. I am even happier to tell you that this was one of the very best meals I have eaten all year, whether in India, South Korea, Japan or the United States.

I was in the Nilgiris in the fourth week of April with the students from my off-campus program to Bombay and Seoul. We had at this time spent three weeks in Bombay. It had, as expected, been a very rich three weeks of cultural exploration. But, also as expected, it had been an increasingly hot and humid three weeks. Accordingly, I had planned a three-night excursion to Coonoor and adjoining parts of the Nilgiris. The idea was both to go somewhere much cooler to give everyone a break for a few days and also to give the students the experience of a very different India than they had been encountering in Bombay. The trip was a great success, despite the hassle of travel: we flew from Bombay to Coimbatore and then took a near 3-hour bus ride from Coimbatore in the plains up to Coonoor in the hills. But our time in the hills made it all worth it.

Our activities in Coonoor had been arranged by an old friend of mine who moved there after retiring early some years ago. She’s always been an entrepreneurial type and so I knew she was itching to do more things with her time and so when I visited her in December 2024 I’d asked her if she might be interested in putting an itinerary together for us and managing it all. After some prodding, she was and, as expected, she put together a wonderful few days for us, all centered on nature (the Nilgiris Biosphere Reseve is the largest protected forest area in India). I’m not going to get into all the things we did; this is not a travel blog. But as it is a food blog, I am going to tell you about this fantastic lunch we ate between two nature-based outings on our first day.

We ate at Odae (also spelled Odea on some sites), the restaurant at the Riverside Retreat, a little distance from Coonoor. Most of the food we ate is not, however, normally served at the restaurant. That food is mostly the more recognizable/familiar fare that Indian tourists (there are very few foreign tourists in these parts) look for while traveling. I’m sure they do all that very well too but my friend had arranged with the owner of the Riverside Retreat, Dr. Suresh Belliraj, for a special feast of Badaga food. Dr. Belliraj, who everybody in the Nilgiris knows as Bison, is a significant figure not just in the Badaga community but in the broader region. He is the founder of the Riverside Public School and is also involved with a number of activities to preserve and promote Badaga heritage and to revive the cultivation of heritage grains and other ingredients. This meant we not only got to eat an excellent meal of a kind we couldn’t have found anywhere else, we also received an introduction to Badaga history and life from Bison himself.

But, as I say, my focus in this post is on the food. We started out indoors in the extremely attractive restaurant, which is spread over two floors. While Bison talked to us about Badaga history and the region we munched on the following snacks:

• Potato chips Badaga style
• Salted beans
• Baby potatoes and garlic
• Fire roasted pork and chicken

The potato chips were the first unexpected delight. The sliced potatoes are boiled, dried and stored before they are salted and fried, and as a result the texture and flavour are much more interesting than that of regular potato chips. The simply boiled and salted red beans and the pan-roasted baby potatoes with garlic were also as tasty as they were unassuming in appearance. Finally, there was pork that had been marinated and grilled perfectly over a fire (for the non-pork eaters in the party there was also a chicken version).

After this opening round we moved out to a large table overlooking the artificial pond/lake that the Riverside Retreat is nestled against. Here a parade of food began.

First course

• Bread with Badaga chicken curry
• Badaga-style egg

The Badaga chicken curry is one of the community’s signature dishes. It’s made with a mix of coriander seed and chillies (and other spices that vary from kitchen to kitchen) that are roasted till quite dark (though not burnt) and then ground to make a masala called koi/chicken masudi. The resulting curry has a brooding dark colour and it was just magnificent. This curry is now customarily eaten with white milk bread. This is an adaptation to the British presence in the region which expanded in the mid-19th century. From a culinary perspective new ingredients became available to the Badagas and others. Rice and wheat entered the diet at the cost of millets. While this has certainly had negative effects, there’s no denying that the combination of this curry and bread is a winning one. Also served alongside was Badaga-style egg, which was somewhere between mini-masala omelettes and steamed egg and was very good indeed.

Palette cleanser

• Spiced coconut milk

And this was just dynamite. Poppy seeds are roasted and ground (to not quite a paste) and mixed with coconut milk and maybe some other spices as well to create a nourishing and deeply flavourful drink that I could have polished off a gallon of. It’s possible that this kind of spiced coconut milk is not uncommon in other parts of South India as well but I had never had anything like it before.

Second Course

• Mutton curry or bean curry
• Spinach
• Ragi balls
• Rice

The next savoury course featured another tasty meat curry, this time with mutton. This is made with a different masala featuring chilli powder and garam masala. Referred to as hatti/village masudi, this is more of an everyday masala than the koi masala. The resulting curry was also excellent. This was served with rice and also soft balls of ragi or finger millet topped with ghee. And on the side were a very tasty bean curry and a preparation of spinach mashed together with potato

Third Course

• Tomato and garlic rasam
• Millet curd rice

The last savoury dishes were aimed to wind the meal down. Nourishing curd “rice” made with samai or little millet (the staple millet for Badagas before the arrival of rice) was paired with an excellent tomato and garlic rasam.

Dessert

• Millet and jaggery pudding
• Sweet Paniyaram

The main event was an outstanding millet and jaggery pudding. This is apparently usually also made with little millet but they chose to make it instead with thinai or foxtail millet which gives it a different texture (and darker colour). Finally, a large bowl of sweet panniyaram was laid out for people to take as they wished.

All in all, an outstanding meal. For a look at everything we ate, launch the slideshow below. Scroll down to see what’s coming next on the food front.

I cannot tell you how much this meal cost as the price was rolled into our overall trip package. But I can tell you that it was worth whatever the per head cost was. Certainly, a significant part of my response to this food was due to never having eaten most of these dishes and specific flavours before, but it was also all just excellently prepared. I think it’s possible to arrange for meals like this at Odae/Odea by calling ahead. If you’re going to be in the vicinity I think it would be a huge mistake to not try your best to set up a version of this. Many thanks to Bison for his hospitality and for sharing so much of his time with us, and to the cooks for the outstanding meal.

Alright, that leaves only one more report to come from my time in India in April. That will be of a very different meal eaten in a very different setting in Bombay: a tasting menu at Masque. I hope to have that up next week (but no promises as it involves processing and resizing a lot of photos and this is a very busy time of my term). Tomorrow, however, I’ll be back with a Twin Cities report—though it will feature not a restaurant meal but a look at a grocery store.

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