7 Best Restaurants in Kerala, India

Like the rest of the resort, the Ambadi's multicuisine restaurant has a rustic feel and is decorated with lots of wood. Head here for well-executed North Indian staples, such as kebabs and other tandoori dishes, butter chicken, and biryani, as well as Indo-Chinese options, Kerala specials, and Western dishes, including fish-and-chips and some pastas.

Specialties at this chain restaurant (and this branch may be the best) include biryani, a flavorful rice cooked with chicken or mutton, and kuthu paratha, a Kerala Muslim delicacy of flatbread stuffed with minced fish and served from 4 pm onward.

The biryani is ready around noon and runs out by early evening, so make sure you get there on time.

This tastefully decorated restaurant offers a flavor of Fort Kochi both with its food, and with its location overlooking the beach and sea. The buffet spread is varied and the à la carte options include choice dishes such as the stuffed red snapper, seafood platters, and desserts like the chakkara choru (a Malabari rice pudding) and Mattanchery sweet spice roll, made with grated coconut and jaggery (unrefined sugar).

Open all day, and with an open-air patio on the cliff, Coastal Kitchen may just be Varkala's best restaurant, serving all regional and Kerala specialties as well as vegetarian options like eggplant curry. Don’t miss the karuvepilai prawns, spicy and fried up with a lot of curry leaves, or the meen polichathu, fish fried in a wrapped banana leaf, or nadan meen charu, a local kind of fish curry; the desserts are good, too.

The airy, glass-roofed Hill Spice, at the Tall Trees resort, is a more elegant alternative to the restaurants in Munnar's main bazaar. The Kerala dishes are your best bet, though the restaurant offers thalis and buffet meals along with Indian, Indo-Chinese, and continental food.

This all-day restaurant located in the Spice Village resort serves some of the best food in the area, including not-to-miss Kerala specialties. You can choose to eat inside the thatched main building, decorated with a colorful selection of cattle masks, on a veranda overlooking the pool, or in the garden.

This quirky two-story café, off Princess Street and near the harbor, has teapots and kettles decorating every available space, including some dangling from the ceiling; some tables are made from wooden tea chests. There’s a fair selection of both Indian and continental food—roast chicken and potatoes, prawn moilee (in a coconut curry), vegetable stew—but the café is best known for its sandwiches and freshly baked cakes and for being a terrific spot for sipping away on a cup of tea for an hour or more.