I sometimes feel the best experiences in a city are not the ones you search for. They are not on Google Maps. They just happen when you are hungry enough.
I was staying in Zostel Hyderabad with my friend Aditya. Every morning, we would wake up starving. Not the kind of hunger where you casually look for a café and order a cappuccino. It was the kind of hunger where you leave the hostel and are willing to eat the first thing that smells even remotely good.
And that is how we found our breakfast spot. There were people standing on the roadside with steel tiffins and around ten baskets stacked beside them. No fancy board. No café name written in cursive. They simply had uttapam, idli and chutney.
The chutney deserves a separate mention because there was no sambar. Initially, I thought something was missing. But after the first bite, I realised the chutney was enough.
The uttapam was warm and slightly crisp from the outside. The idlis were soft. The chutney was fresh. And the entire breakfast was ridiculously affordable. An uttapam for twenty rupees and idlis for ten. For around sixty rupees, the two of us could eat enough to remain full for hours.
Obviously, we returned the next morning. And then the morning after that. It slowly became a ritual.
Cheap, tasty and healthy. The holy trifecta. Maybe that is what made those Hyderabad mornings beautiful. It was not just the weather or the city. It was the simplicity of knowing that every morning, somewhere outside our hostel, ten baskets and a few steel tiffins were waiting for us.