Mumbai: Bandra
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Benne
As in 2024
Heena Khandelwal, June 29, 2024: The Indian Express
Bangalore-born Akhil Iyer, founder-producer of The Artist Collective, who moved to Mumbai 11 years ago, decided to enter the world of hospitality to savour and serve crispy and buttery golden brown coloured benne dosa.
For many of us who have migrated to another city or country for better work opportunities, there’s always that one dish we can’t wait to have the minute we reach our hometown. But how far would you go to satiate your cravings?
Started in partnership with his wife, Shriya Narayan, a psychologist, Benne is a small ‘darshini’ style eatery — a quick-service format neighbourhood space that serves fresh, hot food prepared right in front of you — launched last month in Bandra.
In a short span of time, it has become the talk of the town and has attracted the likes of actor and mom-to-be Deepika Padukone — also a Bangalorean — who visited Benne with her actor-husband Ranveer Singh and their families.
It is no surprise then that the eatery, which stays open between 5pm and 11pm on weekdays and 7am to 11pm on Sundays, already sees long queues half an hour before it opens its doors.
The menu offers four varieties of dosa – benne plain dosa, benne masala dosa, benne podi plain dosa, and benne podi masala dosa.
“Benne means butter in Kannada. While some stories suggest the recipe comes from Davangere, a city in central Karnataka, which also uses butter as its base fat, ours is different,” shared Iyer, adding, “We offer a Bangalore-style benne dosa, which is thick, crispy from the outside, soft on the inside and has a golden brown colour to it.”
When asked what led to this venture, Iyer admitted missing the benne dosas of Bangalore and failing to find a single place in Mumbai that offered them the same, despite actively searching. He then began to convince Bangalore-based restaurateurs to bring them to Mumbai, but when nobody jumped on the idea, he decided to do it himself.
“I learned the art of making them from a dosa master who has a very successful thela (roadside stall) on Avenue Road in Bangalore,” he shared, adding, “The trials took about two months, using my kitchen as an R&D lab and consulting a series of chefs and people from Bangalore.”
Spread across 275sqft, including the kitchen, Benne has no seating area but benches for guests to keep their plates. Orders are placed through a self-service digital kiosk.
The menu offers four varieties of dosa — benne plain dosa, benne masala dosa, benne podi plain dosa, and benne podi masala dosa. We sampled the benne podi plain dosa (Rs 175), which was thick and crispy, smeared with gunpowder on its soft inner layer and topped with a dollop of white unsalted butter. It was served with green coriander-coconut and red tomato-onion chutneys. The dosa was so crispy and buttery this sambhar lover didn’t miss its absence much.
“The reason we don’t serve sambhar is primarily because that’s how it’s eaten in Bangalore. Also, it’s tricky to manage hot sambhar in this tiny space,” shared Iyer, adding that they have tied up with a dairy in Dadar for a steady supply of unsalted and unprocessed butter.
Benne has also introduced Iced Filter Coffee, which has gained a reputation for itself in a short span of time.
Next was our favorite, the benne masala dosa (Rs 175). It was coated with a delicious stone-ground kempur chutney—a thick paste of garlic, onion, and tomato—from inside and served with aalo paliya (the yellow aloo masala) and the same two chutneys on the side. We polished it off in no time. The idli vada (Rs 70), served in a pool of watery green coriander-coconut chutney didn’t stand out. We were, however, very impressed by the iced filter coffee (Rs 75), which has already earned a reputation for itself.
Although benne means butter, and this restaurant celebrates it, they are happy to make dosas in oil for vegans and offer coffee with oat milk.
In an industry where the failure rate supersedes success by a huge margin, we couldn’t resist asking what made Iyer jump onto this wagon. Iyer smiled and shared that almost everyone advised him against it, and advertising guru Prahlad Kakkar even said he wouldn’t recommend opening a restaurant to his worst enemy. But he still went ahead.
“It takes some amount of stupidity and naivety to do it. Plus, I am a romanticist who thinks from his heart. I knew it would be difficult and involve a lot of emotions, but I also knew that we would figure it out,” he shared, and immediately added, “We approached Benne with a lot of honesty. It was a calculated risk. I am also aware that everything—whether it is Instagram or how things have unfolded, whether it was Dia Mirza coming on day one or Deepika Ranveer or the love showered on us by fellow restaurateurs—has been a fluke!”
