This was my real first South Indian meal: at the bustling Chennai branch of Saravana Bhavan. I thought it was cute how the guy at the table on the left was helping the boy (his son, I guessed) to eat. Notice how everyone eats with their fingers — right hand only, if you please! The left-hand taboo is related to traditional toilet cleansing practices, although these days you’d think there would be a right-hand taboo among toilet-paper-using people.

This is a major Indian chain — when I looked for the one we visited in Chennai, I found about a dozen, and I’m not sure where we actually were. Happily for my short-term eating plans, the one California restaurant is in Sunnyvale, near my new home.

We got vadai in curd (which just means yogurt, above) and with sambar, a slightly spicy sauce. I preferred the tangy curd — I loved Indian yogurt, which seemed freshly made and preservative free wherever we got it. Alone, it always arrived in a tin cup, sometimes warm, smelling like yeast, and barely jelled, with a few cracks along the creamy surface leaking whey. Somehow it seemed very pure, austere yet satisfying.

I got a ghee masala dosa, top, with extra clarified butter and a spiced potato filling. Jess, our hostess in Chennai, got a rava masala dosa, saying it’s made of a batter with lentils. It was certainly crunchier and more flavorful than mine, but I’m puzzled because in “Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cooking,” Julie Sahni says masala dosai are made with a fermented batter of rice flour and ground gram beans (urad dal), whereas rava dosai are made with cream of wheat/semolina, rice flour and regular flour, plus more spices than the regular dosai.

Although we couldn’t resist rounding out our meal with “7-taste uttappam,” it turned out we’d already tasted five of them in or on our dosai and idli. The last two? Grape jelly, on the right, and, top right, ketchup. Yes, ketchup. Daveena said it tasted like it had some Indian spices in it, but I didn’t taste any other spices than were lingering on my tongue from the other sauces.

Jess was told that her favorite, the brown one in the center, is made of groundnuts, but the person who told her that emphatically denied that groundnuts are peanuts. But as Daveena and I were traversing the state by car later, our driver stopped to give us a taste of some groundnuts that were drying on the road (and by “road” I mean HIGHWAY; Jess says the problem of farmers appropriating even the new highways as agricultural workspace is so pervasive, they’ve had to widen the shoulders).

Ah, South Indian coffee! It’s kind of like a latte, but a bit more intense, with a caramelized sweetness. You’re supposed to pour it back and forth between the cup and bowl, Jess said, to cool it — a wise approach, on a 90-degree day.

Saravana Bhavan