Restaurants trim menu, wayside night eateries shut shop as gas shortage puts livelihood at stake

Kochi: The familiar sizzle of a crisp dosa spreading across a hot tawa or the rhythmic clang of a wok tossing noodles may soon fade from Kochi’s dining scene. As the commercial LPG shortage across Kerala deepens, the city’s vibrant restaurant industry is scrambling to stay afloat. From upscale eateries to roadside Thattukadas, kitchens across Kochi are undergoing a drastic transformation: menus are being slashed by as much as 50 percent in a desperate attempt to conserve every last gram of cooking gas.

The crisis has turned the simple act of ordering a meal into a gamble. “We are at a point where the menu is no longer a list of what we can cook, but a list of what we can afford to heat,” said Deepak, who runs a popular restaurant near the Kaloor International Stadium.
The casualties of this fuel drought include several local favourites that rely on continuous high-flame cooking. Puttu, appam and dosa, among Kerala’s most beloved breakfast staples, are increasingly disappearing from menus because the steamers and tawas needed to prepare them fresh consume large amounts of LPG to maintain consistent heat.

“Freshness is our trademark, but fresh food requires live counters and stoves that stay on for hours. With the current shortage, keeping a tawa hot for a ‘live’ dosa station is simply impossible. Many restaurants had to cut our menu in half, focusing only on items that can be prepared quickly or in bulk to minimise gas usage. We have stopped cooking dosa and appam as we cannot compromise on the freshness and quality,” Deepak told Onmanorama.

Chinese cuisine, which depends on high-pressure burners to produce the signature “wok hei” flavour, is also slowly vanishing from menus. Even the ever-popular biriyani is under pressure, as the long ‘dum’ process and the large volumes of boiling water needed for rice are becoming too gas-intensive for restaurants already operating on their last cylinders.

The kitchen crisis is now spilling into the digital world as well. Online food delivery platforms are witnessing a surge in “currently unavailable” items as restaurants trim their digital menus to match their shrinking kitchen capacity.

“The situation is slowly worsening and we are preparing for it. The lack of enough choices for customers is a major concern right now,” said an official from a prominent food aggregator in Kochi. “People want what they want, and when the variety drops, the number of orders also decreases. We are also seeing a significant increase in delivery times. If the number of operating restaurants decreases, the load on the remaining ones becomes a bottleneck, and the entire logistics chain slows down,” the official added.

For delivery partners on the ground, these delays are more than an inconvenience as they threaten their daily earnings. Sajid, a food delivery executive who has been navigating Kochi’s streets for over three years, expressed deep concern.

“If a restaurant takes 40 minutes to prepare a single order because they are struggling with a lone induction cooker instead of four gas burners, I can only complete half my usual deliveries. We are terrified that our jobs will be affected because customers will stop ordering if the food takes forever to arrive and the choices are so limited,” Sajid said.

Desperation has pushed many establishments to explore alternatives to gas-based cooking, but the transition is far from simple. While some restaurants are experimenting with electric induction cookers and steamers, the infrastructure of many kitchens in Kochi simply cannot support such a shift.

“Most restaurant owners are hesitant to switch entirely to electric systems. Many establishments still have old wiring, and high-power electric appliances can easily trip the mains or create safety risks. On top of that, commercial electricity tariffs make the shift hardly cost-effective. The equipment itself is also far more expensive,” said a hotelier along MG Road, requesting anonymity.

“For instance, a traditional gas-based dosa tawa costs around ₹1.5 lakh, whereas an electric version costs about ₹3.5 lakh. Operating a gas tawa for around 18 hours requires up to one-and-a-half LPG cylinders a day, which comes to roughly ₹1,800 daily, or about ₹54,000 a month. But if we use an electric tawa, the electricity cost for that alone can reach ₹5,000 a day, nearly ₹1.5 lakh a month, which is almost three times the cost of using gas,” he added. The impact has been even harsher on Thattukada owners, whose livelihoods depend on steady nightly sales. Many have either temporarily shut shop or reduced operating hours due to the shortage.

“Usually we are open late into the night. But we don’t have enough cylinders to work for that many hours now. Items in our menu have been cut down and this results in losing many customers,” said Josemon, who runs a Thattukada in Irumpanam.

Perhaps the most striking shift has been the return to firewood. Restaurants are increasingly searching for “smokeless” turbo-stoves as traditional firewood cooking produces heavy smoke that can inconvenience customers and nearby shops. However, the sudden surge in demand has also fuelled profiteering in the market.

“Stoves that typically cost around ₹16,000 are being sold for more than ₹80,000. Because the sellers are aware of the demand,” Deepak said. With most restaurants restricted by safety norms to keeping only two or three spare cylinders, the buffer has vanished. Without immediate intervention to restore the commercial LPG supply, the “fresh and hot” culture of Kochi’s dining scene faces a grim, permanent cooling.