Six of One: Dosa Special
The best dosa in London: dosa buffets, Madurai kari dosa, Tolworth masala dosa, diamond onion rava dosa, comically large dosa and more.
Hello and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants.
Six of One is a column dedicated to London restaurant recommendations. In each issue, six writers will share a restaurant, bakery, cafe or takeaway spot that they believe deserves to be better known. You can find the full Six of One back catalogue here.
Today’s Six of One is a dosa special, with contributions from Samanth Subramanian, Shekha Vyas, K. Biswas, Apoorva Sripathi, Isaac Rangaswami, and Mohammed Ali Salha.
1. Chennai Srilalitha
As if Chennai Srilalitha were an alternate universe, the rules of dosa mathematics break down at its door. Per the menu, a plain dosa costs £4.49, but pay £6.99 and you can eat as many dosas as you want. For that rate on weekdays, between 11 am and 3.30 pm, a buffet promises several things, including dosa after dosa freshly fried and delivered to your table. On weekend mornings, the price edges up slightly, to £8.99. I believe an asparagus side – barely grilled, with two grains of sea salt and a smear of mayo – can cost more than this in some London restaurants.
Like breakfasts at Tamil weddings, the buffet expounds on the myriad variations of rice and lentils. They can be combined into pongal, which is better than risotto if only for the addition of ghee and whole black pepper; turned into batter, to be fried into vadas that are crisp on the outside but softies at heart; ground up, fermented and steamed into soft, jasmine-white idlis; and griddled into thick, round uthappams studded with onions, green chillies and curry leaves.
But the canonical order is the dosa. Dosas in Bengaluru are butter-roasted to a deep mahogany and come with a bright, spicy, red chutney coating their insides. Dosas in Chennai, and therefore in Chennai Srilalitha (which also has branches in Wembley, Amersham and Finchley), are thinner, and when they cook on a pan, their concentric marks of brown on white recall photographs of Jupiter or the cross-section of a geode. The menu will try to tempt you with abominations: a chilli-chips-cheese dosa, or a chocolate dosa, or the £17.99 jumbo dosa, four feet long. Ignore them. The buffet’s choices – plain, stuffed with a potato-onion mash or, terrifically, served with steamed and spiced green bananas – are all the dosa you will need. If you must go off-piste, order the podi dosa from the menu, its interior strewn with a spice mix made from chillies, sesame seeds and black gram. Once, in an American airport, I had a pack of this podi confiscated by customs officers, who distrust any powder in vacuum-sealed plastic. They had the right idea: it is better, cheaper and far more addictive than cocaine. Samanth Subramanian
196 Kenton Rd, Harrow HA3 8BX
Behind the paywall: Madurai kari dosa, Tolworth masala dosa, lacy rava dosa, diamond onion rava dosa, comically large dosa and more.
