The tiny restaurant in a corner of the heritage village of Kalpathy in Palakkad town is an aberration of sorts in a rapidly proliferating world of gourmet kitchens and inter-continental fast-food chains. The eatery, which dishes out the traditional cuisine of Kalpathy, attracts food lovers in hordes.

“You will not find this dish anywhere else. We call it morappam,” said Guru Annan, owner of the eatery called Aishwarya Home Mess, showing a snack made using rice flour mixed with buttermilk. Another attraction for retro-worshippers at the shop is a special ‘ada,’ prepared using extracts of jackfruit. “We buy jackfruits during season and prepare the extract for the remaining months to make the ‘ada,’” says M. Narayanan, brother of Guru. The ‘ada’ is eaten either with tender mango pickle or with a specially prepared ‘avial’.

Now, Aiswarya is the only eatery where the traditional meals of the Brahmin ‘agraharams’ of Kalpathy are available. These families, which migrated long ago from Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu, had unique food habits, which died out with the passage of time. With people leaving ‘agraharams’ and engaging in different professions, their cuisine underwent a drastic change.

“Many old people come here with a deep sense of nostalgia. Even outsiders visit us though we do not have umpteen options on the menu,” says P. Balan, a resident of the area.

It was Guru’s father C.G. Venkitanarayana Iyer who started the eatery in the 1950s. With little to no marketing budget, it sustains on word-of-mouth endorsement.

“We provide the best of vegetarian fare in Palakkad. More than an eatery, it is a living museum of the food tradition of Kalpathy,” said Mr Guru.

A tiny eatery sells, among others, morappam, a dish unique to Kalpathy agraharams