Mysuru Food Trail

Mysuru is a breakfast city that happens to own a palace. The dish worth travelling for is the Mylari dosa, which is not what the rest of India sells under the city's name. It comes off a cast-iron griddle pale and thick and deliberately soft, buttered while it is still on the pan. Coconut chutney comes beside it, and the masala version has an onion-and-potato sagu folded in. Arrive expecting the crisp red-chutney cone of Bengaluru and Mumbai menus and you will think the kitchen sent it out half-cooked. The other pillar is Mysore pak, which came out of the palace kitchen and is now made two ways. One is soft and collapses on the tongue, carrying a great deal of ghee. The other is harder and porous, made with ghee cut with oil. Shops sell both under the one name without saying which is in the tray, so ask. Past those two, Mysuru is a market town with an appetite. Devaraja Market has been trading since 1886 and sells jasmine and betel leaf as seriously as it sells vegetables. Mandi Mohalla cooks mutton pulao outdoors over firewood. And in the evening the churumuri carts go up across the city, tossing puffed rice with grated carrot and spiced peanuts into a paper cone that is never allowed to become a plate.

Make the dosa your first move of the day. The Mylari hotels are small rooms with a griddle and a queue, and they are not all-day kitchens — the one trading as the Old Original Vinayaka Mylari, a green board with red lettering on a corner off Nazarbad Main Road, is closed on Wednesdays and shuts again for part of the afternoon. A Wednesday morning needs a different breakfast. Order the masala dosa and the sagu is already inside it; the butter is not something you have to ask for. What you should not do is ask for it crisp. Two is the right number and one is a decision you will regret before lunch. Mysore pak is an afternoon errand. Ask which of the two versions you are being handed before you buy any weight of it, because the soft ghee-heavy kind and the hard porous kind are different sweets wearing one name and the shop will not raise the subject. Guru Sweet Mart's claim on the recipe is the strongest in the city and its pak is the soft sort. Devaraja Market is a produce and flower bazaar, not a food court, and the eating inside it is thin. Come fed. What it is worth walking in for is the jasmine and the spice stalls. If you are here during Dasara, which falls in September or October depending on the lunar calendar, every queue in this article doubles and rooms get scarce. The food is better served by almost any other week of the season.

Mysore pak came out of a working kitchen rather than a legend. Kakasura Madappa, chief cook to Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV in the early twentieth century, put gram flour, sugar and ghee together and produced something the Maharaja liked enough to ask the name of. Madappa answered on the spot with the name of the city. The more consequential part of the story is what the king did next: he had Madappa open a shop outside the palace walls so that people who would never eat at his table could buy the sweet. That shop is Guru Sweet Mart, still at Shop No. 1 in the Devaraja Market building on Sayyaji Rao Road, still run by Madappa's descendants. The rest of Mysuru's eating history is trade rather than court. The soft dosa is named for the Mylari hotels on and around Nazarbad Main Road, the senior of which dates itself to 1938. Hanumanthu's mess in Mandi Mohalla has been selling mutton pulao since 1930 and still cooks it in cauldrons over open firewood. Both names have since been borrowed by neighbours, which is why so many boards in this city carry the word original.