Tselha Anze, the Tibetan restaurant at the Cornwell Road-Langford Road intersection offers a vantage point from which the Bangalore-watcher can sample the city’s capacity for unexpected flowerings. A former haunt of college students (an ageing Kandinsky poster bears testimony), you can now encounter a different kind of boisterousness—corporate raiding parties intent on down-market kicks.

The signboard bears the legend ‘Our Grandmother’s Recipe’. That claim is supported somewhat by the depth of the menu, and its capacity for surprise. Some items are followed by parenthetical markings such as B/C or V/B/C, indicating a choice between vegetarian, beef and chicken versions. This coyness seems to spring only from the need to save space, for the next page has a section quite succinctly titled ‘Beef’.

The long list that follows reads like a poem, in a city where beef is beginning to go underground and lives by euphemisms and limited appearances due to the combined demands of middle-class respectability and recent government noise. A visiting friend had begun asking the question “Aren’t they Buddhist?” when his bowl of chops arrived. He submitted meekly to its call and texted me in anguished withdrawal from another city the next day.

There is plenty to gawk at without. The building sits on what was once the border between the British Cantonment and the villages that separated it from the old city.

An expanse of glass forms one wall, and you may stare for hours at what is left of the villages of Akkithimmanahalli and Aithampalli, settled centuries ago by the Thigalas who fled religious persecution in Tamil Nadu to become gardeners in Bangalore. These villages once sat on the rim of a lake, now replaced by a stadium and a high-rise. During the monsoon, the road tends to disappear, allowing one to speculate endlessly about what it would take to get the lake to reappear.

Tselha Anze, 1 Cornwell Road
Timings: 11.30am to 10.30pm
080-41235438, 9731351771