Nowadays, everything has changed. New dishes, new flavours, new restaurants popping up every other month – the generation has moved on fast, and honestly, most of it has moved on for good reason. But somewhere in that rush of everything new, a few old tastes got left behind. At Samrat, we made sure they never did.
Walk into Samrat today, and alongside everything that’s grown and modernized over the years, you’ll still find a handful of dishes that were never touched – kept exactly as they’ve always been, on purpose. Not because we couldn’t change them, but because some tastes don’t need changing.
The filter coffee still comes the old way, brewed slow, poured with that signature froth between tumbler and davarah. The dosa still gets its time – batter fermented properly, not rushed, so it comes out crisp at the edges the way it always has. The idlis are still soft, still steamed the traditional way, still served with the same chutneys and sambar that haven’t needed to change in decades.
And then there’s soda sharbat – you might have tried soda, you might have tried sharbat, but have you ever tried ಸೋಡಾ ಶಾರ್ಬತ್? Chilled soda, a good splash of sharbat, that fizz that hits exactly right on a hot Bengaluru afternoon – the same drink people grew up on, still made the same old way, glass bottle pop and all.
The payasa, the vadas, the curd rice at the end of the meal – these have stayed just as they were too. While the menu around them has grown with the times, these few dishes were kept deliberately unchanged, because that’s genuinely how they’ve always been done here, and we never saw a reason to fix something that was never broken.
If you’re someone who still remembers these tastes – from childhood, from a simpler time, from a Bengaluru that moved a little slower – you already know what we’re talking about. And if you’re someone who’s never had it, this is your sign to come try it.
So the next time you’re looking for a meal that carries a bit of the old alongside the new, come to Samrat. Old generation food, old generation taste – still here, still the same, waiting for anyone who loves it.