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LOOKING FOR ‘SATTVIC’ VEG THALI MEAL DEAL!
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LOOKING FOR ‘SATTVIC’ VEG THALI MEAL DEAL!

Eating is Fun / Eating is Yuck! - A variety food column October 17, 2025 , by

OVER the years of my 50 odd working woman’s life in media, first for 30 years in Bombay which is Mumbai now, and the last nearing 25 years in Goa, if there’s one thing which shines out as a constant – it is search for a decent meal to be healthy and happy. We sometimes call it “pet puja” and dear to all rich or not so rich.
In this respect, I would describe the many Udipi eateries as the salt of the earth for the common people, they are found in every big time metro serving primary traditional meals. Meals which are vegetarian, wholesome, lifesaving and utterly agreeable and I will single out the gift of a basic veg thali meal deal. Lunchtime almost all good Udipi eateries would offer this for this eating out on a working woman’s or working man’s limited budget.
So used am I to the veg thali meal deals for lunch that to this day I look for them with a connoisseur’s eye! An American friend of mine from abroad once exclaimed, “This is the best meal deal, I live on thali meal while travelling India. It’s most balanced and sometimes utterly satisfying, I can afford the thali meals on my shoestring budget.”
In Goa and my experience in lunching out occasionally down town Panjim yields some wonderful places and I’m forever in search of decent veg thali meal deal on a hungry afternoon — at the Goan and not-so-Goan eateries. Be it at Siddhi’s or Humyog or Bhonsale’s or Kamat’s or Anandasham which opened recently down Carazalem…at Mallu Republic you’ll find a meal deal of Kerala cuisine and lately I’ve fallen for an eatery which I won’t share here because it is my current favorite!
One may find a veg thali meal deal priced at anything from Rs100 to Rs180 at most of the aam aadmi eateries . I like to think this economical thali meal deal concept traces back to the times when there were local “karnaval” most everywhere, even in small villages or towns where single men would turn up for an afternoon “homely” or “ghargutee” meal cooked by a widow living in stressed out times, or a home maker in need and want…she/he/ family would entertain a limited number of folk for lunch at their home. One may sit at rudimentary arrangement of tables and chairs or simply sit on the floor on a cotton mat rolled out and the food would be served to them on dry leaf platters or real stainless steel platters…a fully balanced meal is served and in Goan tradition there will be a “elaichi” or so called delicious cardamom banana to wind up your meal with (except that one should really eat the banana first because it is uncooked good food and digests fastest!)…to wind up a meal there will always be something else like kokum solkoddi or kokum tival (a mildy spiced up buttermilk if somewhere down south India where one may find the most sumptuous lunchtime thali meal deals). Very often one would see the words “Meals Ready” flashing outside a modest home eatery and one may step in, wash hands, sit down to be served the lunch of the day cooked by someone who knows how to cook and not just anybody who’s just arrived looking for a job from Nepal or Bihar or anywhere else in the country!
The veg meal deal is usually standardized: There would be one of our Indian flatbreads like the usual chapattis (two in number), rice, a seasonal vegetable – one dry and one with gravy, a dal (lentils), a farsan (appetizer) like say deep fried “kappam” (savory fritters of raw banana/potato/breadfruit/brinjal/in a Goan eatery the “mirsang bhoji” is popular)…then there’ll be things like a portion of cut salad greens, quarter lemon piece, the crunchy papad, bit mango or lemon pickle, tiny drop of salt for those who want their meal saltier…sometimes a veg thali meal deal is a limited or rationed, or one paid a little more for an extra helping of sabzi, dal or whatever one took a shine to in the lunch menu of the day. One may eat to heart’s content and personally I find these “gharguttee” meal deals too much to eat at times, but usually very agreeable to the palate and rarely badly cooked, or too salty, too spicy, too sweet, overcooked…in the old days these khanaval meals were charged on a monthly basis, most bachelors found these meal deal places convenient wherever their work took them.
I suppose in time the “khanaval” concept was replaced by the chain of eateries called Udipis, or we have our Goan eateries still to be thankful for as many of them still serve vegetarian thali meals, some more exotic than the others. Some regulars learn to eat according to what suits them most – maybe say no rice, give extra chappati meal, some like me would say please give me my meal without sweet, papad, pickle…and the request is indulged. Where I go these days when I’m really in a mood to eat out I get an extra helping of the sabzi of the day, or dal, if I say no sweet/papad/pickle! Most places serve two chappaties but if I eat only one, I wrap up the other one and take home in a tissue paper to slow roast it into the Guju “khakra.” Leftover chappaties also do well if you tear them to bits and stir-fry them a little jazzed up with veggies and cooked in a cup of seasoned buttermilk, makes for a delicious quick fix snack instead of say, Maggie noodles fixes.

OF COURSE there is also a non-vegetarian thali meal deal, but I tend to prefer the routine vegetarian deal and it may be really sattvic or somewhat sattivic as I may like it … although in recent years I find some meal deals can be atrociously saltier, spicier, worth chucking. When one says “sattvic” I mean a balanced meal flavorful with natural flavors coming through and not predominantly disagreeable to the palate with too much salt, chilli, oil, sugar, too much of anything else which is unwarranted….pure sattvic vegetarian makes sense if you consider the other two words flung around in what is now Ayurveda or Ayurvedic cuisine, with the defining words “rajasik” and “tamasik.” Rajasik refers to rich food and especially well seasoned meat dishes, while tamasik is of course outright gross food to grow obese on!
If you talk to Baba Ramdev or Sadhguru Jaggi or Shri Shri Ravi Shankar you will get a fine analysis of what is sattvik, rajasik or tamasik and why one should make one’s choices depending on what kind of lifestyles we seek to live happily or unhappily ever after; do you want to be a “yogi” or a “bhogi” or a “rogi” — something like that, go work that out as you wish! Needless to tell you that is the purely sattvic meals which in the end contribute majorly towards a healthier status.
The Ayurvedic lifestyle has its own encyclopedic rationale of what to eat, when, and how, and if one manages to understand and master it well, you may say you’ve found the fountain of youth. Hard to do but not too hard! This is to say in my experience the veg meal thali deals in some of our honest down-to-goodness local eateries offer more or less desirable and welcome meals, and I do prefer them to the adventurous show off-5 star buffet extravagances of luxury hotels; okay, for special occasions it’s okay but one may not pig out on buffet spreads, unless one is doing just one meal a day. The calories do add up and if they’re also mala fide calories, you want to check your weight and review on the register of what you’re suffering from mind and body, heart and soul. All connected, my friends and over the years again and again there’s been evidence turning up between the linkages of what we put in our mouth day in and day out and what we suffer from…malnutrition, malnutrition and malnutrition. Regardless of how wealthy you may be and what not you may be able to afford from best chocolate to avocado to all the super foodie supplements of alternative healthcare.

SPEAKING for myself I would be happy to eat only one meal a day if I could find a flavorful sattvic veg thali meal deal daily! Lately, I’m keen to see someone present a 2,000 calories veg meal deal for aam aadmi budget. Trust me, if the government could make a decent sattvic veg meal deal available, to all at the bottom of the pyramid of the good life, the country’s health parameters would improve in a generation. Our hospitals would be less packed up with patients in various stages of saying goodbye cruel world! What we put in out mouth majorly determines our diseases manifesting sooner or later and taking a toll of body beautiful. This is being said over and over again and yet we don’t learn or we don’t have the infrastructure to abide by simple common sense.
Providing an infrastructure so that the people of a country may eat well and nutritionally is surely any good government’s primary role on behalf of its people? Who it represents or may pretend to represent nowadays! It would be great if patients of all denomination could access a sattvic thali meal deal daily either very nominally priced or for free, for some predetermined time and yes, I do believe obesity, diabetes, tuberculosis, heart disease, cancer … could become a thing of the past! This is what preventive healthcare is all about.
What would my Ayurveda sattvic veg meal deal be all about? Say, “ukde chaval” and/or a choice of our traditional Indian flatbreads of wholewheat, and especially the rice/jowari/nachne/bajari/thalipeeth bhakri…then portions of wholesome dal-sabzi-chutney-kachumbar salad, lemon or mango pickle maybe, papad maybe. Sweet maybe but may it be sweetened with jaggey or another traditional sweetener. No refined sugar anywhere for we know how carcinogenic it is and how it is to be found in a slew of refined carbohydrate foods, which offer nothing but useless calories to grow fat on and little else. Whether you want to make a meal of such a sattvic thali meal deal is up to you – the ball is in your court. Being sattvic doesn’t mean the food is dull and forgettable, to the contrary – maybe you remember the meals served in many of our down to earth ashrams or wellness retreats, all veg but all memorable life-giving eats for meal times. That is how we need to eat and the government of the day is duty bound to make it possible for people to eat better, healthier! I want to too and so do a lot of folk like me, especially seniors unable to cope with life as they grow old and older.
It would be great to be able to access a sattvic thali meal deal, tiffin-style, daily, which doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. Next best thing, find a local aam aadmi eatery around you which is still faithful to providing honest food to make you happy, check out any of the eateries aforementioned here. This is to say once again I am so grateful for our local eateries and all the faithful Udipis — thank you ever so much.

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