Why Your Masala Dosa Has A Hormuz Problem

How does the Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz affect the fate of masala dosas across India? This is the question raging in people's minds even as the nation grapples with an unprecedented shortage of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG), induced by the West Asia war.

The answer to the question that has acquired breathtaking virality is that dosas are commercially made on hot plates that require the gas burners under them to be constantly on. This is a necessity because the hot plates need to be uniformly hot for each dosa to come out right with the acceptable balance of softness and crispiness.

When there's an LPG scarcity staring at hotels and restaurants, the last thing anyone would want to do is keep gas burners on without a break, which is what happens when dozens of dosas fly out of your restaurant's hot plate in a day. It's the same reason - the hot plate-gas burner dilemma - why a teppanyaki demonstration by celebrity chef Nishant Choubey was shelved at the ongoing AAHAR 2026 food and hospitality show. For Choubey, in fact, it has been a double whammy: a wedding for which he had been signed up has been postponed to a later date. And this, he says, is not a one-off case.

Dishes like dosa require the gas burners under them to be constantly on

"You can have your fill of idlis, which are cooked in electricity-powered steamers, but forget about dosas for some days," jokes Anurag Katriar, founder of the company that runs Indigo restaurants, and Trustee, National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI).

And if you thought you can still have your chhole-bhature, don't get too excited. Delhi's iconic maker of this popular dish, Sita Ram Deewan Chand, has just announced the temporary closure of two of its outlets because of the LPG crisis.
Elsewhere, in Kolkata, Speciality Restaurants Founder Anjan Chatterjee of Oh! Calcutta fame has announced that the lavish buffet spreads at his popular Mainland China and Flame & Grill restaurants are being replaced with a "curated" (read reduced) 'Buffet on the Table' from Monday to Thursday. Dhaba Estd. 1986, meanwhile, has compressed its menu across its restaurants to the extent that it is "necessary to stay relevant in the business", says Ravi Saxena, Corporate Chef, Azure Hospitality.

The missing dosas may be headline grabbers, but these are not the only items on the menu of your favourite restaurant that may go missing. Any dish that requires a longer cooking time, say, a butter chicken or mutton roghan josh, or even biryani, is most likely to be axed as long as the present crisis lasts - or alternatives are found to be equally efficient, cost-effective and conducive to quick cooking.

 LPG shortage is affecting the restaurant business in India

A popular restaurant, for instance, if the industry grapevine is to be believed, has switched over to cooking its famous butter chicken on firewood, which is a concern in a city like Delhi with a permanent AQI problem. Coal-based tandoors, which had been banned to protect the city's AQI, are in fact back in action because restaurants cannot afford to let down their kabab-loving clientele.

The degree to which the industry responds to the crisis varies from restaurant to restaurant. The ones with piped natural gas (PNG), which is the case with most mall restaurants, can breathe easy, but as Amit Bagga, Managing Director, Daryaganj Restaurants, who also heads the Delhi Chapter of the NRAI, says, not more than 25-30 per cent of the city's eateries are in this category. In the South, especially, as Saxena points out, PNG is still not easily available. So, his restaurants have switched over to induction ranges and cooking stoves with heating coils to minimise their dependence on LPG.

Then there are restaurateurs, such as celebrity mixologist Yangdup Lama, who may be running multiple outlets, some with PNG and the others with LPG. Lama has three outlets - two (Sidecar in Delhi and The Brook in Gurgaon) run on PNG and one (Cocktails and Dreams Speakeasy) on LPG, which is already facing the challenge of the vendor demanding a substantially higher price for each cylinder: Rs 3,000 as opposed to the official price of Rs 1,700.

Breathing easy, for the moment, though, are restaurants with 'reserve' cylinders, which, if you've been to the kitchens of eateries, you'll find stacked up in steel cages. "But what happens if you have a reserve of 10, but only two are filled up?" asks Katriar. It can be a problem because, as Sabyasachi 'Saby' Gorai, a leading chef consultant and mentor, points out, an average 100-seater restaurant could require up to 55-60 commercial cylinders in a month, which works out to at least two in a day.

These questions and counter-questions are flying thick and fast in the hospitality sector as it struggles to cope with a crisis that, like Covid, to quote Chatterjee, is "out of the syllabus". The problem, Gorai points out, is that hotel and restaurant kitchens are designed in most cases to operate on LPG because electricity-run cooking equipment are more expensive to run. "These are fine as long as the present crisis ends within a short time," adds Gorai, who also points out that consultants like him have to contend with restaurant launches being delayed because of the LPG scarcity.

Restaurants across India are compressing their menu. 

Where does the crisis leave the street vendors, a section of the food service industry that has not yet featured anywhere in the LPG conversation? Sangeeta Singh of the National Association of Street Vendors of India (NASVI) says the panic calls have just started coming in - one from Ludhiana, for instance. Street food vendors being scattered across the country do not make instant headlines, but their economy runs on LPG and, as Singh emphasises, they cannot switch over to electricity-powered cooking equipment because the overwhelming majority of them find themselves not eligible for connections under existing rules.

Rajeev Janveja, Senior Vice-President and Corporate Chef, Lemon Tree Hotels, shares a 10-point plan that he has prepared for reducing the use of LPG and PNG across the company. The guidelines range from increasing the use of pressure cookers and cooking in small batches to cutting down hot items on buffets, to even rationalising staff meals. But these are short-term solutions at best, or so the industry believes. Saxena of Azure Hospitality echoes the sentiments of the industry when he says, "This war has got to end somehow. Else, we'll have to shut down."

(Sourish Bhattacharyya is a New Delhi-based food columnist, author and blogger, and a print journalist with more than three decades of experience.)