It took a while for this story to be written. On the day Saravanaa Bhavan opened, sometime in March this year, I happened, miraculously, to be driving past. The restaurant is in a spot that some used to call ‘cursed’ because no one ever lasted very long there. Now, right on day one, there was already a long queue consisting entirely of Indians, stretching all the way from the stairs down to the pavement. I went straight in to take a look, but grabbing a quick bite to eat was out of the question at that moment. The news that Amsterdam was also getting a Saravanaa Bhavan branch (after all, they are all over the world, from Malaysia to Bahrain and from India to Canada) had spread like wildfire through the Amsterdam Indian expat community, which now numbers around 8,000 people. Not long after, I returned to eat there and I think I can already declare this place, now in November, as the culinary discovery of 2016. Below I explain how on earth I come to make such a serious statement so early in the year.

Saravanaa Bhavan is pretty much the only authentic South Indian restaurant in the Netherlands. Everything is vegetarian and the menu is incredibly extensive. You can order well over 300 different items. 372 to be precise. Including all sorts of fantastic drinks like “rose milk”, “special madras coffee”, sweet and salty lassis and badham kheer (an almond-based milk drink with cardamom and saffron). Unbelievably fantastic! You can go there for breakfast, lunch and dinner. How brilliant is that? Having an Indian breakfast at the weekend with things like medu vada (lentil doughnuts) or idli (steamed rice cakes) and masala chai. A nice change from a slice of bread with a boiled egg or a toastie with ketchup. Or an overnight-oats-super-acai-chia-goji-anti-oxidant-bowl. Shall we just put a stop to that last one anyway? Can we agree on that? Cheers then.

When I first ate here a while ago, the clientele was mainly Indian. By now, Amsterdammers have also found their way to this brilliant joint, meaning the crowd is a colourful mix of expats, hipsters, baby boomers, and everything in between, beside, and beneath.

As you can see, in this case, you don't need a whole lot more than a few good chairs and tables combined with terribly good food to make your place do a roaring trade:

We'll start with the special breads, a museum could be opened about those alone.

Look, this is poori:

Looks a bit like the Albanian sandwiches that I made earlier.

This is uttappam, which is also a very tasty dish with some vegetables mixed through it:

And here you can see what I ate today, for lunch:

The enormous pancake you see above is called a dosa and in this case was filled with a well-spiced potato mixture. The mouth-watering, mild sauces on the side taste of coconut and coriander, amongst other things.

Earlier I had already eaten medu vada (lentil doughnuts):

Today I also had a look behind the scenes and spoke with the owner Kris Ramamurthy about his restaurant, more about that later...

The food there is made fresh every day. Nothing is kept or made a day in advance. The chefs start preparations at around half past five in the morning.

Water is spread over the baking tray with a coconut broom:

And time to bake those loaves:

And what I also had for lunch was vegetarian Thali (that's what the platter below is called in its entirety) with pooris, pappadum and rice:

And a mango lassi to cool down when it all got a bit too much for me occasionally.

You eat a thali clockwise. You start with the least spicy bowl shown in the photo above at the level of the mango lassi (with the small dish of Indian sambal on top) and then eat dishes that get progressively spicier step by step (yes, steps, not leaps!). The bowl directly opposite the little dish I ate from first was the absolute spiciest. I accidentally took a good-sized mouthful and immediately had tears in my eyes from the misery. So be careful and make sure to eat lots of rice with it all the time. After the spiciest bowl, you'll see a watery concoction. That's more like a kind of accompaniment, and after that you get the yoghurt, buttermilk with coriander and mustard seeds, and raita to extinguish the fire once and for all. The very last bowl is a dessert made of lentils, coconut pieces, cashews and cardamom. This is Ayurvedic food, so everything must be in balance.

The third container from the right below is a cauliflower curry. In the container next to it, you can see a green piece of vegetable. I thought that was okra, but it turned out to be drumstick, a vegetable from the moringa tree. The outside is hard, but if you bite the vegetable open, you can eat the soft inside. Bitter taste and packed with iron, or so I was told.

That is Kris. An extremely nice, lovely man, and how grateful I am to him for coming up with the idea of bringing Saravanaa Bhavan to the Netherlands. When you've finished eating, you can have a spoonful of sauf (aniseed) as a mouth freshener:

Kris said that every morning, before the restaurant opens, he goes into the kitchen to taste whether everything is exactly as it should be. If something is not right, they remake the dish.

For my column on BNR Nieuwsradio, I interviewed Kris. You can listen back to it here here.

Be sure to ask the waitstaff for advice when making a choice. The menu is really quite overwhelming if you are not familiar with the cuisine. If you arrive around 1pm for lunch, there is usually space, but the evenings are by far the busiest and then you can sometimes expect queues. But the wait is rewarded, so if you ask me: definitely join the queue!

Do yourself a favour and stuff your face at:

Saravanaa Bhavan

• Stadhouderskade 123-124
• 1074 AV Amsterdam
• 020-7531250
• Mon to Fri from 11:00 – 22:00 | Sat & Sun from 10:00 – 22:30