Chilli Pepper

For A Taste of Bihar

This one is for the die-hard foodies in Bangalore. Bangalore is crammed with restaurants at every nook and corner of the city, offering you the best of cuisines from all over the country and the world too. You name it, they have it, from local and South Indian cuisine to the regional ones like Punjabi, Mughali, Andhra, Chettinad, Gujarati, Rajasthani, Balti and international cuisine such as Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, French, Italian and Vietnamese.

Wonder if you noticed one notable miss in this list. If you have, and if you want a taste of it, there’s only one place you got to go. Welcome to Chilli Pepper, the only restaurant in Bangalore that serves Bihari cuisine. The most popular dish they serve here is called Loti-Chokha, a favorite of the maverick Laloo Prasad Yadav. In fact, Loti-Chokha is to Laloo, what ragi mudde is to Deve Gowda. According to the chef, the difference lies in the taste, where Loti-Chokha has an edge.

It looks like a cricket ball, where baked whea-flour constitutes the outer layer and sattu (fried gram flour and cumin) lies in its core. It is baked using charcoal. The accompaniments to the main dish, such as chokha, a raw mixture of boiled potato, roasted brinjal and tomato, seasoned with finely cut green chilies, onion garlic and ginger among other things, make it a nutritious food item for the winter. For non-vegetarians, Lotti-Chokha also goes well with chicken curry or mutton curry.

Dharmaraj, the restaurant owner, demonstrates to us how a litti is consumed. He cuts the litti ball in half, then pours ghee which has been heated using a red chilli. The ghee mitigates the dryness of litti.

Though a Keralite, Dharmaraj spend 35 years in Bihar, and that’s how he developed a great deal of interest and taste for Bihari cuisine.