BENGALURU

It’s known for being India’s tech capital, but Bengaluru is also arguably the country’s best city for vegetarians and vegans, with a truly vibrant meat-free dining scene

This high-tech hub is home to one of India’s most vibrant meat-free dining scenes

Buttery dosa drenched in coconut chutney, fluffy idli dipped in mild yet addictive sauces.

South Indian snack food is luscious and languid, with flavours that sing of the Keralan coast, and spicing as mellow as Goa trance music. Yet, in the city of Bengaluru, India’s Silicon Valley, this is food eaten not in beach bars but standing — accompanied by a shot of sweet coffee and a copy of The Times of India.

A wealthy garden city of flowering vines and star jasmine, palaces, temples, perpetual spring and eternally gridlocked traffic, Bengaluru has seen an influx of tech companies in recent decades. As a result, the pace of life in the city — formerly called Bangalore — has accelerated at a rate that must have surprised even its most bullish entrepreneurs. Even rickshaws can be ordered on Uber now.

Bengaluru’s darshinis (vegetarian, selfservice snack bars) were seemingly made for this moment. The first, Cafe Darshini, was founded in 1983 at the start of Bengaluru’s tech boom. It offered the Western fast food restaurant model, only reimagined for northern Karnataka state’s predominantly Hindu — and therefore largely vegetarian — population. It started a trend, and there are now more than 5,000 darshinis in Bengaluru. Almost by accident, it’s become one of the most vegetarian-friendly cities in the world.

Darshini is breakfast food, so, as a cool dawn breaks over the city on my first morning in Bengaluru, I make my way through humming streets to Brahmin’s Cafe, a darshini cafe. After overconfidently dousing my vada (a savoury lentil doughnut) with scorching sambar (chilli sauce), I try to tame the heat by dipping chunks in cooling coconut chutney. Eventually, I get the balance just right, enjoying each bite of soft, spice-soaked sponge. In the time it takes me to do this, a group of children come and go, dodging three lanes of scooters and rickshaws to make it back to school before the bell finishes ringing. I’m in no hurry, though, and wander to the enormous, 19th-century church next door, somewhat incongruously dedicated to St Patrick, where vases of tropical flowers are being prepared for a wedding.

For lunch, the dosa (a delicate rice-flour pancake) is just one of the menu items I sample at India’s best dosa bar: Mavalli Tiffin Rooms, on Lalbagh Road. The 21-course set menu on the wall behind the cashier is written in Kannada — Karnataka’s most widely spoken language — and turns out to be for the restaurant’s famous thali. It’s not a purist’s darshini joint — it’s too fancy, with table service and seating — but it specialises in darshini staples like dosa and sambar.

Founded in 1924, and frozen in time shortly afterwards, the restaurant has tiled side rooms in which I can see men working dough into roti as I’m led upstairs to the ‘Family Room’ — the sign on the door a throwback to the Roaring Twenties, when women and children dined separately from men. The segregated seating

Clockwise from top: Vegetable vendors line a street in Malleswaram, one of Bengaluru’s oldest districts; milky filter coffee, an essential part of life in South India; Brahmin’s Cafe, a hub for darshini devotees