Walking down Gandhi Bazaar Road towards Vidyarthi Bhavan, Bangalore’s most famous dosa joint and one of its oldest, I get the distinct impression that I’ve wandered into Calcutta’s Lake Market area by mistake. The same flower shops dot the pavements, small stores do brisk business on a Sunday morning and mamis with fresh flowers in their hair haggle over the price of mangoes. The Calcutta area, an expat South Indian locality, also boasts of two ancient dosa joints — Prema Vilas and Kamala Vilas.
In Bangalore, though, dosa lovers inevitably head for Vidyarthi Bhavan, as they have been doing for the last seven decades. It is a piece of old Bangalore in the heart of old Bangalore — in Basavanagudi where the Bull Temple’s bells chime the hour and where you may be forgiven for forgetting that the slick Bangalore of shopping-mall food courts dishing out low-grade food at high-grade prices and gourmet stores selling shiitake mushrooms, smoked salmon even exist.
Vidyarthi Bhavan, where a masala dosa costs all of Rs 20, plays by its own rules. It serves only ‘tiffin’, that is, no meals, only snacks. It opens its doors early, when the first office-goers stop by for a quick dosa-and-coffee breakfast and the morning walkers at Lalbagh often drive by before heading home. It downs its shutters at 11am on weekdays and 12 noon on Sundays and holidays — the extra hour its only concession to those who might find it difficult to drag themselves out of bed on a holiday. It stays resolutely shut between 11am and 2pm, adhering to the sacrosanct rule that dosas and idlis are not meant to serve as lunch, and then opens up again, serving dosas by the hundreds till pack-up time.
“We’ve never been tempted to change this routine or the menu,” says Arun Kumar, 35, the son of the proprietor Ramakrishna Adiga who took over the management of the eatery in 1970 when he bought it over from its previous owners from the Kundapur-Udupi coastal belt who started it in 1943.
Vidyarthi Bhavan got its name from the fact that it was a popular eating place for students from nearby colleges such as National College and B.M.S. College. They were the restaurant’s first patrons before its masala dosa gained legendary status and started drawing the family crowd too — Sunday breakfasts here are a tradition in many families in the area.
It doesn’t take long to decide what to order off the menu; in fact, the menu doesn’t exist. Pinned to the wall is a table with the items and prices on it. Only about half a dozen items, with no surprises. Masala dosa, plain dosa, idli, rava idli, khara bhaat (upma, as it is known elsewhere), kesari bhaat, tea/coffee. The hot masala dosa — surprisingly small, one had expected a large, crisp dosa poking out of its plate — arrives at my table, carried by the waiter expertly holding more than ten similar plates stacked together. How do you do it, I ask the pleasant young man serving me. Practice, he smiles.
The dosa gives off a buttery aroma, served with a dollop of thick coconut chutney on the plate. The customary bowl of sambar is missing, and when you ask the waiter for some, he looks amused but ready enough to grant your upstart-ish wish. Vidyarthi Bhavan, I learn later, is famous for not serving sambar with the dosa but only with idlis and vadas. Not a loss, really, as far as I can make out. The sambar is brilliantly red and slightly sweet, i.e., regular ‘darshini’ standard — the ubiquitous fast-food eateries that dot Bangalore. The dosas, of course, live up to the hype, with their light, flavourful potato stuffing that no darshini can manage.
The waiters know most customers by their faces, and sometimes even by their names — the walls of the eatery are lined with pencil sketches of luminaries from Karnataka and include Kuvempu, U.R. Ananthamurthy, Girish Karnad and Bhimsen Joshi. Rajnikanth reportedly has a parcel picked up whenever he is in town.
As I leave after the customary cup of no-frills filter coffee, I get talking with Tejaswini Awadhani and Vijay, young and enthusiastic theatre artists who swear by Vidyarthi Bhavan. Why do you keep coming back, I ask. Practice, they say.
The information
Where:No. 32, Gandhi Bazaar Road, Basavanagudi, Bangalore (080-26677588).
Timings: Weekdays, 6.30am-11am, 2pm-8pm; Sundays and holidays, 6.30am-12pm, 2.30pm-8pm; Friday closed.