Sri Paandi, Brickfields

J had to send his cousin and girlfriend down to the NICE bus stop early last Saturday morning. To compensate for the early wakeup call, he offered to take me for a nice thosai breakfast in Brickfields. It was about 7am and Brickfields was just starting to come to life on a nice morning with pigeons all around and the early morning sun peeping through the clouds.

This is it! The shop that left such a great impression on J with its "thosai rawa garing"! Even at that early hour, the place was already full of people tucking into all kinds of Indian delicacies on banana leaf plates.

I was really happy to see a tray of freshly fried doughnut-type "Vadai" at the entrance of the shop. Vadai is an Indian savoury cake and there are two basic shapes, made with different ingredients. This is the doughnut-shaped type made out of lentil and wheat flour, spices, onions and chillies. When fresh from the hot wok, it's crispy outside and soft and fluffy inside. And each mouthful has a little burst of spices. Really good!

This is the thosai rawa garing. I like how they serve it on freshly washed banana leaves and the fact that they give you 3 of your very own buckets of mango chutney, coconut chutney and dhal. Perfect for people like me who love drowning their thosai in gravy! The mango chutney (that reddish blob on the left) was really delicious. It had generous slices of unripe mango cooked in a sweetish sourish thick sauce. I was eating so much of the chutney, J suggested that I just drink the whole bucketful! :p The dhal was a little watery but with a whole bucket, who can complain!

The thosai was really good! It was freshly made with crispy edges and a soft centre and was full of spices and onion. Eaten with our fingers with generous lashings of dhal and chutney, it was definitely a breakfast worth waking up for!
Just before we left, the canai man at the entrance treated us to a canai-pulling demonstration!

This was the man in charge of making the thosai. The metal bucket holds the thosai batter and the white oval shapes on his gridle are thosai in progress!