Restaurants in Kochi (Cochin)
After our drive up from Alleppey and an hour of two of touring in the area of Fort Kochi, our first meal in Kochi was at the Grand Pavilion, the house restaurant of the Grand Hotel. The room featured a very orderly arrangement of cloth covered tables and vest-wearing waiters who provided very efficient and kind service. It was quite busy when we arrived and we watched a procession of servers enthusiastically delivering huge plates of rice to table after table.
We enjoyed a very good bowl of corn & chicken soup which was basically Chinese egg drop soup and the house specialty Karimeen Pollichathu or Pearlspot (a fish native to Kerala) roasted in Banana Leaf. While a bit on the boney side, the flavor was delicious. Butter Chicken is my wife’s favorite Indian dish and she says what was served at the Grand Pavilion was the “2nd best butter chicken ever.”
At the end of the meal our waiter comped us a lentil and jaggery dessert.
While in Kochi, we stayed a bit outside of the city at the Cranganor History Café & Riverside Château. As best I can recall, this is the only hotel we’ve ever stayed at that included the name of the house restaurant as a part of the hotel name and IMHO, the owners are rightly proud of the History Café. Every meal was terrific.
Breakfast included a huge fruit plate, perfect toast, a choice of juice (the pineapple was especially good) and very good coffee, which was almost sweet without adding anything. Over our stay there we enjoyed perfectly prepared omelets and eggs sunny-side up. One of the food highlights of the entire trip was a terrific Kerala rice and coconut breakfast “roll” that we never saw anywhere else before or after our visit.
Dinners were equally as good. One night we started with Spicy Hot and Sour soup, followed by an out-of-this-world perfectly cooked grill snapper with an outstanding glaze and a nice plate of vegs as a side.
Probably the mildest entrée in terms of heat of our entire time in Kerala was the Cashew Chicken here. It could be described as chicken in milk sauce and while it wasn’t a hot spice, it was certainly flavor-fully spiced, a characteristic we enjoyed in Kerala cuisine.
The only shortcoming we found at the History Café was the lack of tonic available for a place that was the perfect setting for a Gin and Tonic. We asked if there was a store we could buy some were told that they were having a hard time finding it but if we did find some to please buy extra for the restaurant. Unfortunately, we didn’t find any until later in the trip in Chennai but we did manage to muddle through enjoying the local Bullet Beer. Hah!
Another restaurant back in the city we enjoyed was Sarovaram Badettu Vegetarian Restaurant, where we had the most upscale Banana Leaf Veg lunch of the trip after a morning of touring. The very nice air-conditioned room was on the 1st (upstairs) level. We got there just before the lunch time rush but even when others arrived it wasn’t nearly as chaotic as our Trivandrum veg lunch. We ordered the minimum number of dishes so the offerings were not as numerous but everything was very high quality. We especially loved the pineapple sauce condiment and the cream of tomato soup. We also learned a very good lesson at this meal. When ordering water at your table in Kerala, you should differentiate between Hot and Cold.