Southern spice

This post I would say is straight from the "Stomach". I am a foodie to the core, always in search of quality places to eat, be it a roadside stall in galli's of Bombay or say a hi-fi restaurant in the tony areas of the Colaba causeway or now Pune. In fact the only areas that I have explored in pune in the last one year is places where you get amazing food and the variety includes moghlai, chinese, rajasthani, food from the south and some more usual but stuff.

Yesterday was one such delightful experience at a small restaurant called "Southern spice" located around a kilometer or two near the pune station opposite to the famous Jehangir Hospital. The specialty of this place is that it has got typical mallu food- yeah now I have learnt to differentiate between mallu ,kandu ,tamil etc and don't club them all into madrasi's like fellow north indians - The punchline for the restaurant goes like "Food from the God's own country" and they truly live up to the expectations.

The ambiance is nothing great to talk about and the service is not up to the mark if you don't know mallu, because all the waiters belong to the God's own country and at times you find it difficult to explain things in Hindi or English. So, we were informed about the day's special crab curry when we had already placed orders for the curries.

But they are the best where it matters the most, FOOD, I was pretty sure what to order since it was my second visit, though my friend found it difficult to imagine what "porrota", "idiappam" etc look like. Our order of Fish fry(Surmai) landed on our plates within 10 mins and believe me it can't get better, deep fried in probably coconut oil it provides immense pleasure to your taste buds. The mutton roast with dry gravy was too spicy and to reaffirm its spicy nature they had added uncountable number of green chilies just to rejuvenate your taste buds incase they are rusted, add to all this host porottas and idiappams make a delightful dinner. For the uninitiated, porotta is a kind of paratha made of maida and idiappam is made of a kind of very thing noodle like strands made of a paste of rice, held together in the shape of an idli.

So next time in Pune, surely try Southern Spice and yeah incase if you thinking something is missing from the true mallu experience, There's an additional attraction, mallu music, most of the times they play mallu songs with an occasional hindi one.