Udupi hotels are now associated with dosa, idli, vada, sambar and filter coffee. The name has travelled far beyond Udupi, becoming a familiar marker for South Indian vegetarian restaurants in cities across India and beyond. But the history of these establishments is also a history of migration, entrepreneurship and changing ideas about who could eat with whom in a public space.
The story begins in Udupi, a temple town on Karnataka’s western coast. The Sri Krishna Temple, associated with the 13th-century saint Madhvacharya, developed a system of preparing food as an offering and serving meals to devotees. The cooks and food-service workers who developed their skills around Udupi’s temples would eventually carry this experience beyond the temple precincts.
South Kanara produced a surplus of rice, but land was scarce. The Shivalli Brahmins, centred around the village of Shivalli near Udupi, had limited access to land and government employment. When poverty pushed members of the community to leave the region in the early 20th century, they relied on a skill already familiar to them: feeding large numbers of people. Their experience of managing food service at temples and shrines became a practical advantage when they began moving into India’s growing cities.
From Temple Service To Urban Restaurants
The first generation of Udupi hotel entrepreneurs carried this experience into cities such as Madras, Bombay and Bangalore. The businesses varied in size, but the model was portable: vegetarian food, relatively inexpensive meals and a workforce experienced in preparing and serving food.
Krishna Rao was among the important figures in this expansion. Born in South Kanara in 1898, Rao began his working life at the Puthige Mutt in Udupi. He later worked in another mutt and at a small restaurant before moving to Madras. There, he joined Sharada Vilas Brahmins Hotel in George Town as a kitchen boy. In 1925, his employer offered him one of the restaurants for Rs. 700, payable in monthly installments. Within a few years, Rao had gone from working in a kitchen to owning a restaurant.
In 1926-27, Rao opened Udupi Sri Krishna Vilas and Udupi Hotel on Mount Road, an area then associated with European residents and businesses. At the time, he found that there was no decent vegetarian restaurant in this centrally located part of the city. He went on to open Old Woodlands in 1939 and New Woodlands in 1952. His businesses subsequently expanded to Bangalore, Coimbatore, Salem, Ahmedabad, New Delhi and Bombay, and eventually to London, New York and Singapore.
Rao’s career illustrates how the Udupi hotel became a transferable business model rather than a restaurant format confined to its place of origin. He also helped establish a network in which employees and associates could eventually start businesses of their own, sometimes borrowing the Woodlands name.
Another important chain was Dasaprakash, founded by K. Seetharama Rao. He joined his brothers’ tiffin business in Mysore in 1921 and later developed the Dasaprakash group. In Bangalore, Udupi Sri Krishna Bhavan and Jnanardhana Hotel were established in the early 1920s, while Mavalli Tiffin Rooms, or MTR, was founded in 1924 by two Kota Brahmin brothers who had previously worked as cooks.
The Caste Rules Inside The Hotel
The early Udupi restaurant was not necessarily the open public dining space it would later become. The entrepreneurs who migrated from South Kanara also carried social practices associated with caste and ritual purity.
In temple rituals, Brahmins had often been served separately, with food prepared in separate kitchens. While the separate-kitchen system was not transferred to Udupi restaurants, many establishments maintained separate dining areas for Brahmin customers. Udupi Sri Krishna Vilas and New Woodlands, for example, retained separate sections for Brahmin diners until the late 1960s. Udupi Sri Krishna Vilas also had a separate section for Muslim customers, while some other restaurants barred Muslims until 1947.
Dalits faced more direct exclusion. Some restaurants denied them admission altogether, while others required them to eat outside using separate utensils. Restaurants that admitted Dalit customers could face social boycotts. These practices placed restaurants within a larger political struggle over access to public spaces and the enforcement of anti-untouchability measures.
Access to hotels and restaurants had become a political issue in India well before independence. In 1923, the Bombay Legislative Council resolved that Untouchables should be allowed to use public facilities, including watering places, wells, schools and dispensaries. In the decades that followed, discrimination in shops, restaurants, hotels and places of public entertainment continued to form part of cases registered under anti-disability legislation.
The conflict became particularly visible in Madras. Activists repeatedly protested against the presence of caste distinctions in restaurants, including the use of the word “Brahmin” on hotel signboards. The Dravidian leader Ramaswami Naicker personally painted over the word on one restaurant signboard. In 1957, another campaign called for the word to be removed from hotel nameboards because its display was considered incompatible with a secular state.
From Segregated Dining To A More Open Public Space
The changes were gradual. In Bangalore, where protests against caste distinctions in restaurants were less pronounced than in Madras, commercial pressures and changing social practices nevertheless began to alter the Udupi hotel. Around this period, MTR changed its name from Brahmins’ Coffee Club to Mavalli Tiffin Rooms, taking the name of the neighbourhood in which it was located. The change reflected a move away from an explicitly caste-based identity, at least in how the restaurant presented itself to its customers. Hotels carrying the word “Brahmin” in their names still exist in Bengaluru, but the separate dining areas that once divided customers by caste have disappeared.
The workforce changed too. As Udupi hotels expanded, many began adding North Indian and Chinese dishes to their menus. These cuisines were outside the traditional repertoire of many South Indian Brahmin cooks, creating opportunities for cooks from other communities. At the same time, succeeding generations of Brahmins increasingly moved into corporate and other professions, making it necessary for restaurant owners to broaden their hiring practices. The hotel was consequently no longer sustained by a workforce drawn largely from the same community that had established the business.
This shift can be seen in the Udupi-style eateries that define Bengaluru’s food landscape today. The restaurants range from small establishments with standing counters to larger dining rooms, but the basic format is familiar: idli and dosa, vada and sambar, meals with rice, rasam and palya, and filter coffee served quickly to a mixed urban clientele. The food may still be presented on banana leaves or in stainless-steel and melamine crockery, while photographs of founders and deities remain common features of the interiors. What has changed is the social setting in which this food is served. The dining room is no longer organised around separate spaces for different castes.
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