MTR: The Emperor's New Dosas

The Mavalli Tiffin Room, reverently known as MTR, is one of those legendary Bangalore institutions that anyone who loves the city or wants to learn to love it is urged to go on gastronomic pilgrimages to.

Queues start forming shortly after the eatery opens in the morning, and crowds throng outside at lunch time. Bangalore is a city that does not have very many sights to see, and so MTR figured high on our list of places to go to.

We made it for family breakfast one morning.

Flooded drains formed a moat around the seedy building that houses the restaurant. We wobbled like tightrope walkers over a makeshift bridge of broken bricks and entered the temple of high cuisine. Many of the most awesome eateries in India look forbiddingly dreary or ordinary. The grimy interior did not deter us. These people have been too busy cooking up heavenly meals for decades to think of lowly details like sweeping and dusting.

People wait for a table, eat quickly and leave. There are no plaster of paris curly ornaments on the ceiling or anything as pretentious as a cummerbund on a waiter or a folded napkin on the sticky tables. The waiters wear lungis folded up and tied around their hips, and they don’t offer you a menu. They are too busy zipping from table to table, and usually neither receive nor expect tips. You choose from the dozen items the kitchen has on offer at the time you order.

MTR is like the Soup Nazi in The Seinfeld Show. You show up, and you wait humbly and politely eat what they give you, in the manner they choose to serve it, because they know their food best and you’d better be grateful to be getting some of it. You don’t ask for sambar if they care not to serve it. There was none at 10 a.m. “No sambar,” the waiter said disapprovingly when some was requested.

The dosas we ordered were tepid and already wilting. They looked practically burned. I glanced at other people’s dosas. All dark brown. The rava idlis, supposedly invented here, were cold and bouncy. The kharabhath was over-seasoned, but the only item colorfully garnished with a tomato slice. The gulab jamuns were warm dough pellets with a metallic aftertaste. I wonder how this restaurant got its name as a food purist.

We had asked for coffee to be brought along with our meal and offered several reminders to our waiter, who put his hand up every time he walked by, nodding as though he were quelling an annoying child. The coffee was brought at the end of the meal, when it is customarily drunk. We sipped it gratefully. After all that below-average, pulpy food, the coffee tasted honest and robust.

This was my second sampling of food at MTR, and I rate its food as unremarkable to downright awful. I can forgive a bad meal at a restaurant. But two unrelentingly awful meals at a shrine where I had to grovel to get a seat? I felt scammed at having to endure a long wait and indifferent service for food even an okay cook like me would scorn to produce. What I can’t understand is that thousands of people line up to shove this food in and still praise the lord for blessing Bangalore with MTR. I just don’t get it.

I know lots of people who say in praise of MTR: “I’ve been eating there for 20 years and the food always tastes the same.” After two equally wretched meals there, I can believe that there’s no variation in the quality of the food and don’t plan to go back unless struck by desperation or dementia.

MTR has sold its venerable brand name to a Norwegian food company that now mass markets its high quality masalas and ready to eat mixes globally. Maybe the restaurant should switch to using these in its own kitchen.

You might wonder if I have something against South Indian udupi food. I love idlis and dosas. The steam curling off fluffy idlis on a plate, the crisp, golden dosa that opens to reveal its lacy, bubbled inside (sounds like Victorian underwear, but never mind!) can get me all excited about tucking into a meal. The mustard and chilis in the sambar set off a loud but pleasingly familiar argument with your tongue, while the coconut chutney calms it down. A steel tumbler of filter coffee is good down to the chicory-flecked sediment. It is a flavorful meal.

Having said that, I must confess a politically incorrect puzzlement I’ve long harbored about South Indian food. How can people who eat idlis and dosas and rasam practically every day, sometimes all through the day, step out of their homes and purposely seek out restaurants where they can find more idlis and dosas to order, meal after meal, day after day, month after month, and disturbingly, hop with ecstasy when they do find that dosa joint (gasp!) at the end of the block? I don’t get it. The food they get all poetic about is practically identical to what they eat at home all the time.

It’s comfort food, and I can understand the tears that may run down a deprived cheek when months of separation from idli and dosa ends with a chance encounter with a perfect hing-laced sambar bubbling in a styrofoam bowl on an icy Chicago morning. You think of the plump squeeze of your mother’s hand telling you to have one more dosa, you can hear your father sucking drumsticks noisily with his teeth. After days of boring cornflakes and waxy bagels and bony toast, you want to dig into idli and dosa and feel your sinuses sting gratefully. Moisture courses down your eyes and your nose and you don't give a damn how you look because your body has all its senses engaged in making some heavenly food disappear. You don't say through pursed lips, "Pass the apricot jelly, Nigel." You're busy making indelicate, slurping history of your idli-dosa combo. I get that.

But to crave a dosa, that same dosa, because the last one you had was in the morning ...?

Can comfort food be so comforting that it can anesthetize you into such a state of zombie gratitude that you can’t snap out of it for decades? I had to physically fight the urge to stand up on a chair at MTR that morning and shout, “It’s okay, people. It’s okay to say it. This food is pretty bad.”

Maybe people just keep going back again and again, more than 20 years, to see if they can finally get a good meal at the place. I’m not going to be one of them.