Tea-poetry

Ever wondered where those tooth fairies and little elves have tea? Ever dreamed endlessly watching the rain pour down heavily holding a hot cup of tea? Ever longed for a place where you could get drunk in TEA? Then, come with me to Peter Celia Street at Fort Cochin, Kerala to a dreamy tea spot called, ah surprise "Teapot".

The ambiance of this little tea-poetry is to die for. Wooden cartons which were used to transport Tea are refurbished as tiny little tables.

Old tea cups reborn as wind chimes decorating the entrance doors. A large wide tea bush with a glass top serves as a table for five. Teapots of various sizes and shades and materials, some hung from the ceiling, some arranged on the sills. A clock that strikes T's.


Large hats used by workers at the tea plantations to protect themselves from the sun decorate the walls. Tea paintings, Tea stories, Tea sale prints on jute bags -- you dream it, they have them all. They have painstakingly made a wide range of collection of all kinds of tea paraphernalia which would take you hours to finish swooning over, of course over a cup of tea, a fifteen different varieties. The walls are painted in mustard, or you could say, could be a tea stain. :)

There are not many tea spots, thumping their chests proudly displaying the true tea spirit in Kerala, though tea is available easily than water at small shacks to big hotels. Teapot tries to fill that void and does it with élan. Quizzed the owner, Sanjay Damodaran, of the brainwave behind the tiny tables and that simple man said, "You know I wanted something easy to lift and move".

Many people have fallen in love with the place. There is a guy who donated his tea pot collections, a poet from New york who churned a poem for this place, people from all over the World disguised as tourists waiting to have that perfect cup of tea at this dreamy hang-out.

I ordered for a samosa which tasted too North Indian for me(pardon me for being divisive, but about food my friends I don't lie) and a Teapot Special tea, that cost me 30 and 40 India rupees respectively.

(Many thanks to the ace photographer Thulasi Kakkat for the photographs while I was enjoying my tea)

Art in a Café

Imagine my surprise, walking into a cafe and greeted by none, no servers, no clutter of tables, no clink-clank of cutlery, just a vast space with an array of staring fiberglass dolls of varying colors, and paintings on the wall.

If you are like me, who can stare at a painting or an installation for hours, drink some black coffee and gobble up some rich and delicious cakes, Kashi Art Café is the place for you.

An old Dutch house converted without disturbing any elements of the house, which is so important for me when I visit converted old buildings. Each house each building I believe has a soul and any renovation should not disturb these basic elements.

After you finish staring at the art, you can enter other rooms, where you are welcomed by chairs and tables scattered filling up discreet corners giving the feeling of an art gallery, never a cafe.

Then you see a small kitchen, sitting areas, a coffee corner with Italian Espresso mocha pots, a cake display stand, tables that look like chocolate fondue, open space into the sky, some plants hanging out, an old wall with moisture paint, and people lazing around. Reminded me of old European town squares tucked into a building at Burger Street, Fort Kochi.

For a moment, if you think they are craftily diluting their menu for art, you are wrong. The menu would seem unassuming and light with items like sprout salad and potato soup.

So you think until you order one of those devilish home made cakes. Oo Ma! The best chocolate cake I ever tasted in Kerala. The moment it tickles your taste buds, you are sure they have used the freshest ingredients without cutting any corners. While waiting for my espresso order, I chatted up with Anoop Skaria, the co-owner who must be loving his job tremendously.

He and his wife Dorrie Younger set up this cafe twelve years back in 1997 for their love of promoting art, and also because nothing like that existed in Cochin before. They are both art lovers and collectors and came up with this idea, Anoop says to remind him of Vienna(Austria) which seems to be his favorite place. It would have been really risky to start something like this in Cochin but to everybody's delight they were proved right. They now boast two Art galleries and Kashi Art Café is the most happening place in Fort Kochi.

Kashi Art Café welcomes budding artists and even run resident programs with a stipend for the artists. Skaria tells me with pride, many now famous artists like Upendranath and GopiKrishna started out small from their little cafe.

I ordered a chocolate cake (Rupees 55) and espresso (Rupees 45). They were perfect to the beans. All this along with Barbara Ash's 'Sugar and Spice'.

No wonder you feel connected to this place even at your first visit, with food and art, how could anything go wrong?

(I cannot express enough my gratitude to Thulasi Kakkat, for the extravagant beautiful pictures that accompany this post and for introducing me to Fort Kochi)

Series Reading.
1. A Princess Story
2. Upstairs Italian Cuisine

Streetfull Stressfree Onam!

Have had many Onams and have prepared elaborate dishes sweating it out the previous nights and in wee hours. After preparing elaborate Onam Sadya, after the backbreaking and the payasam sweetness, I would just want to put up my feet and snore to glory and have happy dreams that another Onam is another year long.

This fresh flower carpet is made on top of an old tyre that caught my attention. This is an auto rickshaw stand and the drivers had decorated their little place with flowers.

Bee dear once proclaimed, Festivals are a burden for the women folks sweltering in kitchens. Very true. But I am addicted to festivals, the traditions, and all the hoopla around it.

This time my Onam is on the streets. Kerala definitely is a must visit on Onam days if you like crowds, food and colors. It is swarming with crowds everywhere from smallest tiny shops to the air conditioned malls. Every street has some kind of Onam mela (which means festivities), all shops lit like Christmas trees, and every tiny bit of waterbody having a boat race.

Onam is not about worrying whether the 14th dish that you are preparing which will be served at the right end of the feast leaf is going to come out alright. So next Onam, visit Kerala and order that Special Sadya meals and have fun on the streets. Every festival is about togetherness and yes, close thy kitchens for once and be together.

The old man at the payasam counter, he wants liters of payasam to take home. There are payasam counters at every nook and fresh flower carpets at every corner. Young and old alike, people are getting out to the streets, buying payasams by the ton, booking Sadyas that will be delivered to your homes on Thiruvonam day, and setting women free for shopping. Breaking the traditions is a must, breaking it like this is bliss!

Brisk business at all the counters selling Onam snacks and dishes.The big vessel is aravana payasam (a special food prepared at Ayyappan Temples)

There is nothing that is not available to buy these days, there is kaalan prepared in bottles. There are various pickles, snacks, injipuli all sold in bottles, you can easily prepare the feast without much work.

Snack items, for the street-tired and the shop-tired.

Onam is a harvest festival dotted with myths and legends and this is just a tiny piece of the harvest waiting to be sold to be made to Onam dishes at homes. This is the season when Govt sponsored farmers market springs up, have agriculture festivals and Kerala would smell like a giant vegetable.

Happy Onam!

A Princess Story

Cochin is considered to be the Queen of Arabian Sea, then Ft. Kochi must be her darling little princess. (It has a Princess Street too).

If one more time I see a Kerala picture with green, with Chinese fishing nets, I would hit my head somewhere. I am exhausted telling people, Kerala is not all about greenery to die for, and coconuts to eat for, that we have much much more. The best place to really get the message across is of course my blog and there it is, me writing about Kerala -- the nongreen version, of course from a foodie stand point. And where else to start, other than about Cochin, and her little princess.


As you stroll down the quiet streets of Ft Kochi, you are amazed by the non hustle, the non bustle, which is so much Cochin. Keeping in mind of Kerala's infamous harthals, you would be wondering whether, it is another harthal day, for you see only very few people, most of them tourists, some from North India and most from Europe. You hear a lot of languages from Kashmiri to Swedish, people idling round like this is their last home, like they have reached the end of the World and have no plans to move out. Tourists with books lazing around on window sills are a constant sight you have to grow comfortable with. I mean don't they have to plane to catch?

Ft. Kochi is not for the tourists, but for the traveler. You don't click pictures, you just breathe in the culture. There are small strange alleys, green moss on old windows, peeled walls, and food!

Before I write about three cute restaurants I visited, Teapot, Kashi Art Cafe and Upstairs, as an introductory post, wanted to showcase a decent restaurant which kind of sits on the edge of Fort Cochin boundary.

Fort Queen is yet another touristy restaurant, all the bells and whistles intact, with the ever present traditional Kerala Menu and the continental breakfasts eying the European traveler, but what caught my eye was the price tag. Food was fresh, delicious and considering other restaurants in and around Cochin, the price was on the lower side.

Ah? Why? and the manager kinda said, We are new, trying to catch up on the market and then we would hike up the prices (Okez, I spiced it up on what he actually said, but that is what he meant) ;)

The food was a lunch buffet, with items like a delicious Travancore Fish Curry, Jodhpuri Okra and freshly made Appams/Naan/Roti. All for a low range price tag of 150 Indian Rupees.


The guy was so shy while I clicked a pic :). He was making delicious appams for us.

An Italian Job!

When you want to really eat some pizza near Pisa, where do you go? Fly to Italy. Yes! Italy has always tugged at my heartstrings with her beautiful Murano glass, with her renaissance art paintings, with her Catholic hymns and songs, with her Sicilian gang stories, and mostly with her food.

(This was the first thing I shot on my first day. The only marketing gimmick I saw in the whole of Italy. Yeah, authentic 'Roman' water ;). We do that a lot in Kerala. hehehe.)

As I had written earlier, after Indian food, I love Italian food. It is not because they both start with an 'I' but it is because it is 'I' as in love. I have this nice warm image of their food cooked with much passion, pots stirred by the chubby little Italian mothers and grand moms. The sauces, the breads, the pasta, the 'ooo ma olive oil'. She reminds me of Kerala with her oil fanaticism. Just like a Malayalee would swear by the coconut oil, Italians would kill for Olive oil.

All we ate was street food and skipped the restaurants. This made our food costs much lower, got the real local flavor and could move between places much faster. So here are some quick shots I found interesting.

(Italy is dotted with small coffee shops like these, where you can get a quick drink or a bite to phonecards. They are called Tabacchi.)

(The rich fruit cake to the many Italian desserts)

(Pizza, Pasta, Rice, Panini, Sandwiches. Choice is unlimited even for a quick bite)

(Italian Gelato. I asked the shop owner whether what he served was the real authentic Italian gelato and he got mad at me. hehe. Maybe he is the Gelato Nazi there.)

(Sicilian fried rice balls)

I was in a small shop in a quaint little town in Florence, Italy and asked the shop owner whether I could take some freshly pressed olive oil in a plastic bottle. And that pleasant sweet man frowned at me. No, he threw up his hands in horror.

"You Americans, don't respect Olive oil", he said. "Never store olive oil in plastic bottle". Ha! I wanted to show him the Olive oil in plastic bottle that lines up in Wal-mart to Costco. He told me I could take some Chianti wine in a plastic bottle, but not olive oil.

--These olives are from November, you know we had a bad season for olives. So the price is little bit up. This will be very bitter. As olive oil ages the bitterness goes away. But we Italians love the bitterness. Only in Tuscany you get the best olives. Up North it is too cold and down south, it is hot.

(This is the shop where I bought some freshly pressed olive oil. All those barrels are wine.)

He was excited to explain to me in his broken Italian accented English. Being so used to pushy cunning salesmen, Italian shop owners were a surprise. They were sweet and kind, telling me what I shouldn't buy and sometimes even telling me the shop I should really explore and not waste time at their shop. You could just stand and talk to them for hours and they would never ask you to buy anything. It was like good old times where you never 'buy' but you build a relationship with the store.

(Roasted Water chestnuts on the streets. I was reminded of Indira. This is the first time I am having them and guess what does it taste like? Roasted jackfruit seeds. Jeez! I am too much of a Malayalee as I always try to find parallels with Kerala food. But really it tasted like roasted jackfruit seeds. If not, I would tell so, right? :) )

(Where else to have the famous Tiramisu other than in Italy?)

(Look at that Salami! - It was perfect)

(All this for nine Euros. Didnt I tell you street food was cheap?)

(Italian Olive trees dot their parks and their streets are dotted with orange trees. Even their tiniest homes have grape vines hanging on small trellis. They are passionate. Aren't they?)

Italians buy their wine, oil, cheese locally. They have not yet embraced the supermarket-everything-made-in-some-far-flung-place-colorfully-packeted-and-marketed system. They bring their old bottles to buy wine, or else if you want a new bottle you are charged one Euro more. Life looks much simpler there reminding me of India a lot.

(Well, Isint that coconut? Do they eat coconut slices? Didnt I tell you Italians are from Kerala? :-). This is a small fruit shop)

As we know, slow food movement started in Italy and it clearly showed when you visit restaurants and small coffee shops. They really eat, not shove it down the throat with a large coke.

My biggest surprise was the less or minimal use of plastic while serving food. Even at the smallest quick coffee shops, we got everything in china. No plastic plates, no plastic spoons and no plastic mugs.
--Wow! So, you mean you really clean the plates and don't throw them away? Really? We do that in U.S only at organic stores.
--Organic?
--Oh that's the new fad in U.S, never mind
(Well, pizza it is and pizza it will be. Tuna toppings. Pizza tastes heavenly in Italy. I have heard this a hundred times while in U.S and yes I do agree. After this the Pizza here tastes like cardboard)

After the daily travel and being a tourist for weeks, back in the plane to U.S all I could think of was having a plate of kuthari rice with some fish curry and I was repeating this recurring dream to my husband dear. When I travel, I am on full alert and hardly get any sleep and I can do this for weeks, but when I am really home I hit the bed for a deep slumber. I slept straight for fourteen hours and what do I find when I wake up? He had prepared some fish curry and rice. He, who rarely enters the kitchen except for an occasional coffee and still gets confused by salt and sugar, Well, that was the best part of my vacation.

(Back home with the real olive oil and some crisp Sicilian bread)

(I hate it when someone gives wrong information about India or her food, so please go ahead and correct me If I have given any wrong information)