Until recently, I had never eaten (or even heard of) a Benne dosa. And then “Benne – Heritage Bangalore Dosa” opened its outlet at Sukh Sagar (in Mumbai) a few months ago. And what an experience it was! The entire process – ordering on a screen, self pick-up, standing and eating, and all done in under 30 minutes at under Rs 200 a person.
While I have been eating dosas for as long as I can remember (both in restaurants and at home), the Benne dosa was so very different. The restaurant’s own site asks what actually makes a dosa memorable – the butter, the crunch, the masala, the chutney, the hands that serve it – and settles on the idea that it is all of these at once. As Wikipedia explains, the benne dose is a Davanagere speciality made by working butter into a batter of parboiled rice, black gram and puffed rice, cooked traditionally on a wood-fired griddle, and served with still more butter and coconut chutney. It is smaller and softer than the dosa most of us grew up with.
I then did some more research. The dish has a history longer than the chain that brought it to me. It traces back to 1928 in Davanagere, where a woman named Chennamma began selling dosas at a street-side stall near a drama theatre. From there it travelled to Bangalore, where institutions built their reputations on it – Central Tiffin Room in Malleshwaram has been serving benne masala dosas since the 1920s, and Vidyarthi Bhavan in Gandhi Bazaar since 1943. What is new is not the dosa but its reach: a regional dish from central Karnataka is now something Mumbaikars queue up for on a Sunday morning. India’s food map is being redrawn by people willing to carry a hyper-local speciality a thousand kilometres and bet that others will love it too.
The other aspect of the experience is how the restaurant chain has turned the eating experience on its head. Self-order and self-pickup. Almost like a QSR. And the stand-and-eat helps them process a lot more customers (and presumably, keep the prices low).
Though this, too, is less an invention than an import. Bangalore’s darshinis – self-service vegetarian fast-food counters – emerged in the early 1980s, more than a decade before McDonald’s came to India, and worked out the same economics from first principles: no waiters, no table service, a small footprint, and customers who eat standing and leave. What Benne has done is take that format, give it a design language and a brand, and put it in a city that pays for the high rents! The founders, Akhil Iyer and Shriya Narayan, came from outside the restaurant business entirely – he a producer, she a psychologist – which may be exactly why they saw the opportunity. The constraint is the strategy: a tiny space with high turns can charge Rs 200 and still work.
I have already gone back twice after the first experience and expect to do so many times more!
