If you ask a Keralite where to find the best food in their state, they will rarely point you to a restaurant. They will point you to a toddy shop. The kallu shaap, as they are called in Malayalam, is the institution most foreigners never find — partly because they are unsigned, partly because they look from the outside like nothing at all, and partly because most guidebooks don't mention them.
Below is a short field guide. The aim is not to send you to one specific place but to give you the small confidence required to push open the door of any one you find.
What a toddy shop is
Toddy is a lightly fermented palm wine, tapped each morning from the crowns of coconut palms. By midday it is mildly alcoholic. By evening, considerably more so. It is served in plastic cups straight from the pot, costs about 30 rupees (40 cents) a glass, and tastes like sweet, slightly sour, slightly fizzy coconut water.
But toddy is not really the point. The food is the point. Toddy shops exist primarily because Keralites discovered, generations ago, that the best possible accompaniment to a glass of palm wine is a small plate of intensely flavoured, slow-cooked, locally sourced food. The cooking is some of the most distinctive in the state — and quite possibly some of the best.
How to find one, how to behave
The most reliable way is to ask your homestay host. They will know two or three within twenty minutes' drive, and they will know which ones are clean, which are good, and which are best avoided in the evenings. If you are unsure, ask for one that is government-licensed and that families eat at — these are the safer end of the spectrum, and the food is just as good.
Once you arrive, the etiquette is simple. Push open the door (there is no host). Find a free table — usually a plastic one under a tin roof. Sit. The waiter will appear with a stained menu in Malayalam; ignore it and ask 'What is good today?' Order the fish of the day, one chicken or beef dish, kappa (steamed tapioca), and a glass of toddy if you want to try it. Do not photograph the room. Pay in cash. Tip lightly. Leave before sundown if you are travelling alone.
What to order
The dishes that almost every toddy shop does well: karimeen pollichathu (pearlspot fish marinated in masala, wrapped in banana leaf, and grilled on coal); beef ularthiyathu (a slow-cooked dry beef preparation with coconut slivers and curry leaves); kappa with red fish curry (steamed tapioca with a fiery sardine or mackerel curry); and kothu parotta (chopped flatbread fried with eggs, vegetables, and meat).
Eat with your right hand if you can manage it. Mix the rice and curry with your fingers. Wipe your fingers on the banana leaf when you are done. The food is some of the best you will eat in India, and the experience — plastic table, tin roof, the smell of coconut oil and burning coal — is one you will think about for years.