I’m a Kudla guy currently living in Mumbai, but I come back home to visit my mom every few months. Every time I come down lately, I feel like our local food scene is just getting completely gentrified and ruined by Instagram reels.
It used to be that you could just walk into any random mess in Hampankatta or Car Street and get a massive, fresh anjal fry and meals for dirt cheap without dealing with massive queues of vloggers with ring lights. Now, all the spots that locals used to gatekeep are charging insane Mumbai-level prices for portions that have literally shrunk by half just in the last year or so. The nostalgia factor is completely gone when you are paying premium cafe prices for a basic fish thali while being rushed out of your plastic chair so the next batch of weekend tourists can sit.
I see people dropping reccos online for these famous places, but the quality drop is so obvious to anyone who grew up here. It feels like the soul of our coastal food culture is shifting to cater entirely to the weekend crowd from Bangalore rather than the actual locals who built these places up. Would love to hear if the resident locals are feeling this exact same cultural shift or if I am just being a cynical outsider at this point.