Breakfast Is the Best Meal in India

Dinner in India gets the attention and the restaurant bookings. Breakfast is where the regional cooking actually lives, because it is the meal nobody has redesigned for visitors. It is also served early, in daylight, in places you can walk to, and it costs about ninety rupees. If you eat one meal a day outside your hotel, make it this one.

In Tamil Nadu it is idli, two of them, steamed at six and eaten by half past, with a sambar that is thinner and more sour than the version served north of Chennai, and a coconut chutney with one green chilli in it. Order pongal if it is a Friday. The measure of a good place is whether the podi is freshly ground; the measure of a great one is the filter coffee.

Old Delhi runs on nihari, which is a mutton shank stewed overnight and eaten at dawn with a khameeri roti, and on bedmi aloo with a spoonful of nagori halwa on the side, which is a breakfast of fried bread, potato curry and pudding, eaten standing up in Chandni Chowk. It is not a light start. It is the correct one, particularly in January when the fog sits on the street.

Kerala gives you puttu, a cylinder of steamed rice flour and coconut, with kadala curry of black chickpeas, and appam whose lacy edges you tear off first. In Colombo, kiribath — milk rice cut into diamonds — with a lunu miris of chilli, onion and Maldive fish that will wake you up faster than the coffee. In Kathmandu, sel roti from a street pan, and buffalo momos by nine.

The hygiene question, answered honestly. Eat where there is a queue of local office workers, because turnover is the whole game. Eat things that are steamed, fried or ladled boiling from a pot in front of you. Skip the chutney that has been sitting out in the sun, and the cut fruit. Your guide eats here too, which is a better guarantee than any certificate on the wall.

We now build a breakfast walk into most first mornings, partly for the food and partly for the jet lag: you are awake at five anyway, the streets are quiet, the light is good and the city is doing its own business rather than performing. It is the cheapest hour of the trip and, going by what people tell us afterwards, one of the two or three best.