Trichy’s unique restaurant where no dish costs more than ₹30

Mohan Shanmugam is an unassuming gentleman, one would hardly think of him as a Renaissance man. Yet that is exactly the honorific I think he should be given. He runs the humble Chellammal Manpaanai Samayal restaurant in Trichy, a unique establishment where meals are cooked in earthenware pots, soapstone tawas, wood fires, and in machines that he invented.

All the 40 dishes they cook daily are healthy, and made with cold pressed oils from their farm. Dishes are brought to your table, and you select what you want.

I chance upon Chellammal Manpaanai Samayal (Chellammal is Mohan’s nickname for his wife, Selvi, and manpaanai samayal means claypot cooking) en route to Chettinad. My travelling companion tells me about it, and we decide to take a detour from Trichy airport. In 20 minutes, we reach the location. There is no signage outside.

The house is peppered with antiques: a vintage record player is playing devotional tunes in one corner, while a grandfather clock stands in the other. Inside, they have a buffet hall (the buffet is priced at ₹360). We take a seat outside, on a set of inviting wooden chairs and tables. Locals from the city also stream in as it gets closer to lunch time. The women (and it is all-women team) enter with hot clay pots from the kitchen to the dining area.

While there is a handwritten menu where the dishes are listed, you can also see what is being served and then decide what to eat. The lady serving us, comes to our table with a tray with 20 small clay bowls, each filled with one dish. I see okra, beans poriyal, moringa fry, plantain, banana stem, and bottle gourd. Each is priced between ₹15 and ₹30. With this you can select a larger bowl of kodo millet or white rice. Next come the curries — sambar, moru curry, rasam.

We relish the meal: it is not spicy, or oily; simple, fresh flavours and tasting of the fresh ingredients. You can take seconds of whatever you want. Even the water they serve is made with herbs, which they say aid in digestion and is cooling. In spite of eating more than 10 different curries, I am not too full. The clean ingredients used in the meal really make a difference.

A look into the kitchen

After the lunch we take a walk around the house. The kitchen is open-air. I see okra being cooked on a soapstone tawa and sambar boiling away in a clay pot. That is when we run into Mohan himself. He shows us his workshop where he is toying with new inventions, and tells us about the restaurant. His interests range from geology and biology, to mechanical engineering.

Mohan, a sixth generation native resident of the region, says he has always had an entrepreneurial spirit. When he was eight, he used to make and sell kites to other children, and collect palm fruits and sell them to his neighbours. He worked as a mining officer and after retirement, in a bid to eat healthier, he started the restaurant.

He is also an inventor, and shows us the machines in the kitchen that are his own creations. “Because of modern non-stick cookware, we are losing the traditional cooking methods. It may be faster to cook on those, but it affects our health.” The wet and dry stone grinders, pounders and oil presses have been attached to a motor so that the process is automated.

“It still grinds the pastes slowly, just as a human would. I do not want any nutritional values of the ingredients to be lost, so we use cold-pressing techniques and fresh ingredients. These machines are not very precise, but they serve my purpose,” says Mohan who is also a TEDX speaker.

All the waste from the kitchen is sent to neighbouring farms, where it is either fed to the cattle or used as compost. “It is my strong ethics and beliefs about life, diet and biology that have led me to the food industry.”

At Officers Colony Road, Puthur, Thillai Nagar, Trichy. Open only for lunch, 12.30pm to 4pm. For details, call 9865356896