This Home Chef Offers Proper South Indian Saapadu Along With Market Visits & Cooking Lessons

New in town or travelling to Chennai? Just sign up for an authentic south Indian saapadu (aka meal) with home chef Sundari.  Plus, food walks and cooking classes too.

Sundari’s services are for anyone looking to discover traditional South Indian Brahmin vegetarian cuisine. Her in-home meals are prepared by her and feature the traditional South Indian dining experience — right from eating on banana leaves to an entire South Indian spread, with sambhar, rasam, kozhambu, kootu (vegetable dish with coconuts and lentils added), applams (South Indian version of papads) and topped off with our very own special filter coffee.

Sundari also hosts cooking experience classes specifically for tourists and travellers, where she teaches participants how to make a range of well-loved South Indian dishes, like sambhar, dosas, and idlis. These classes happen all year round and have a live demo, along with a hands-on cooking experience where she helps you make five types of delicacies in her specially prepared kitchen at home that has all the utensils and ingredients you will need. Her last offering is a market visit, something that will appeal to foreigners as she walks you through her local neighbourhood market, shows you how fresh coffee beans are ground, how wheat is milled and shops for groceries and cooking essentials.

If you have moved to Chennai recently and want a ready reckoner on what a homemade meal in the city feels like, then this is something you should try with your friends. The additional cooking and market visits can also be used as add-ons to the whole experience and all put together will take up an entire day’s worth of time (starting from 9am to 9pm, with a two hour break in between).

It’s not easy explaining Indian cuisine to those that aren’t from here because there’s very little quite like it anywhere in the world. However, platforms like the one Sundari uses, fix that issue by offering experiences for newcomers to try out, and in this case eat!