Sakthi Vilasam has evolved as a favourite joint of young food connoisseurs in the Palakkad-Ottappalam-Shoranur area only recently. But it has a history of 80 years and its owner, Madhavan Nair, is turning 102 next month.

Over 1,500 people have breakfast, lunch and dinner on most working days at this modest joint. The food is a mix of Thanjavur and Kerala culinary styles. Mr. Nair, a widower without children, stays in a room at the eatery.

He wakes up at 3.30 every morning and, after prayers and reading, enters the kitchen around 5.30 a.m. to guide the cooks. Then it is time for routines such as cleaning and serving. For 12 hours from 10.30 a.m., he will be at the cash counter.

Mr. Nair says he was the first in his family to enter the restaurant business. After Class V, he left his home in search of a job, despite his expertise in Kerala’s traditional percussion instrument Ilathalam. He reached Mayavaram, near Thanjavur, and worked there as an assistant to a cook.

“My dream was to become an Ilathalam exponent. But it was sheer poverty that drove me to take up a job in a hotel,” Mr. Nair says. After four years, he returned to Edathara and started the eatery.

A Gandhian, Mr. Nair believes in providing quality food at affordable rates. The eatery is out of bounds for smokers and alcoholics. “I am a vegetarian by choice. So I decided to keep the hotel a vegetarian one,” he says.

An avid reader, he reads two Malayalam newspapers and one Tamil newspaper every morning and has strong opinions about social and political issues. With age, this fan of Tamil films has stopped going to the movies in recent years. However, his relatives say that he never has had any disease. Even now, he reads without spectacles and gives the exact balance to customers.

The local people are planning a mass feast at Government Upper Primary School at Edathara in July to mark the 102th birthday of Mr. Nair.