How a small Abu Dhabi eatery turns Kerala memories into magic — parottas to hearty potthu kaal

One of my most vivid childhood memories is of traveling across Kerala by bus with my mother and sister, hopping from Irinjalakuda to Ernakulam, Kottayam, and in and around Tripunithura, visiting an endless rotation of relatives. For an eight-year-old still trying to make sense of an ever-expanding family tree, what stuck with me wasn’t the people—but the food.

Not the food we ate at relatives’ homes, but what my mother would find at bus stops and roadside stalls. Malabar parottas, chicken and mutton curries packed into little boxes, and cutlets wrapped in old newspaper. My sister and I would wolf them down on the bus, and asking for more, while my mother would say, “That’s all for now.”

That’s where my love for Malabar parottas began: the crisp, flaky layers, oily and golden at the edges—especially when paired with a spicy mutton curry. After our trips to Kerala stopped, I never quite found that taste again. Even in Delhi, where parottas and curries were sometimes on the menu, they didn’t carry the same soul, the same sense of being made on the spot with urgency and love.

Years later, in the UAE, a friend suggested a little restaurant called Thalassery Thattukada.

It’s a small restaurant, near Big Mart Hypermarket, Al Khalidiya, Abu Dhabi. You enter, and you see straightforward, simple setting of tables and chairs, that gradually fill up by evening. But the thing you notice most is the silence. Not an awkward one, but the comfortable hush of people lost in good food. The kind of silence that only exists between close friends and family sharing something just that good.

That same silence settles over us every time we visit.

Our ritual is always the same: start with a steaming kadak tea, pore over the menu, and settle on Malabar parottas, sizzling beef curry, or the special potthu kaal, a giant meaty bone swimming in spicy gravy. Later, they’ll come and crack the bone open so you can scoop out the rich marrow with your parotta. There’s also a fragrant mutton biryani, fiery chicken fry, and buttery fried rice that deserve their own mentions.

We live in Al Samha, so it’s a bit of a drive. But every trip is worth it. We’ve gone for birthdays, quiet weekend dinners, and once even took my father-in-law. We rarely deviate from our usual choices: the potthu kaal, parottas, and biryani. Most times, we can’t finish it all, so we take some home. The flavours linger, lasting a little longer—like the memory itself.

You don’t often find a place that can stir up the same feelings and flavours from your childhood. When you do, you savour it, for the taste, and for the time it brings back.