The Farm

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Life on The Udder Side Ours is a 70 acre integrated farm that was started in 1974. Produce from The Farm is also on offer for guests to take home.
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The Farm consists of a dairy (cows & water buffalo), a poultry (free-range chicken & turkey), horses, fields (rice, fodder & vegetables) and plantations (coconuts & eucalyptus). Our aim is to bring the farm and hospitality together, thereby allowing for alternative sources of income as well as allowing for more people to enjoy the space. We currently run a restaurant that can seat 50 people and also a Bed & Breakfast for guests who would like to stay over and experience life on our farm. The restaurant on the farm is a thatch roof structure with cool green shade netting around the sides. Built within an existing coconut grove and with brick flooring, this structure gives our guests the feeling of being outdoors while having the comforts of indoor dining. The Farm welcomes many different types of guests – families on a get-away, business people over for team lunches, school children on field trips, overseas travelers looking for a new experience – there’s something for everyone here. The Farm is a perfect setting for a quiet meal, a large corporate event or a party with a difference. The Farm offers multiple interesting locations around the property for events as well as dining and also undertakes outdoor catering. The Bed & Breakfast that currently comprises of 8 homely rooms are a great weekend get-away from the city. Long-term stays are also offered to Business travelers who would like a different experience from that of a regular Hotel or Service Apartment.

11/10/2026

Sunday lunch just hits different.
The pace is nice & easy, the attire should include elastic waistbands, the tables must be large & full of laughter & the fact that we possess a separate stomach for dessert must be established once again.

Here’s a random collection of plates that caught my eye today because they “slap”, as young people say these days.

1. Pork ribs braised in our wood-fired oven & finished with a sticky-sweet-soy-shakkar sauce.

2. A salad that feels like a walk in our garden. A combination of cultivated & wild ingredients tossed in a dressing made from a wild nightshade.
This is why it’s called The Farm Walk Salad :)

3. A Sindhi classic - Aloo Tuk - which is all sorts of wonderful on its own. I mean, what’s not to love about double deep-fried potatoes!
Made it extra with a generous drizzle of our Provolone cheese spread, jammy garlic confit & bacon.

4. That same Provolone cheese spread as a star on its own.
Not a Fondue, because Ohmygod Chennai weather.
Nevertheless it’s a bowl of molten cheese with mushrooms, the garlic confit makes an appearance again and things to dip into said bowl.

5. No Sunday is complete without the Konkan seafood thali.
Malvani crab curry, garlicky prawns, rava fish (catch of the day) rice flavoured with Hirwa masala & a glass of Sol Kadi.

6. A dark chocolate brownie is great as it is. But why not with some of our salted caramel & a scoop of our dairy farm special Créme Anglaise ice cream!

7. I love small sharing plates that get a meal started. Creamy, luscious mushroom pâté with crunchy sourdough baguette.

8. Ugly delicious and how. This 10 hour slow cooked Coorg-style Pandi curry is ridiculously melt-in-your-mouth and the warm, soft milk bread is perfect to mop it all up.

I especially love that we use the residual heat of the pizza oven to cook the pork overnight.

9. Insalata Caprese
How a salad from an island in southern Europe finds a place on our menu never ceases to amaze me, but it’s here for all the right reasons.
Fresh Mozz made with milk from our herd, basil grown in the garden, locally grown tomatoes.

By the end of this year, I want to have Indian Olive oil in our kitchen.

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09/10/2026

Keeping with the spirit of celebration & joy, today seems like the perfect day to talk about Diwali!

As with every year, we have a collection of food gifts that are deeply rooted in our Home World. The treats we make just for the season. Boxes that remind one of the joy of small batches made with ingredients that come from our dairy farm. Because Mithai made with fresh milk is all sorts of wonderful.

One month to Diwali ✨✨

08/10/2026

3 of us went to accept an award & celebrate.
30 stayed back to keep the wheels turning.

This one is for them.

The ladies in the washing room & housekeeping who don’t even have time to be foul-mouthed once service gets going, while we constantly fret about how much water is used.

The ammas & gardeners who sweep our garden, pull out weeds even I beg them not to, water the plants just before it’s going to rain and laugh because I can’t do half the amount of field work that they can.

The Cheese Room boys who have to balance heat & humidity & manage molds & rinds and keep precise logs & wait patiently for months to know if they got it right.

The Bakery who are forever dealing with demands for more cake & more bread & more cookies; all made in wood-fired ovens that require you to know fire & heat without a thermometer.

The Service team who set tables, re-set tables, run behind kids who are stealing knives off other tables, pick up tissues that get flung on the ground, re-fill water jugs without being asked, who smile and say “thank you” when a guest says thank you, no matter how much we tell them the word is Welcome.

The Kitchen team, made up of a motley crew of boys who have the weirdest names for one another, who never look at the clock when there’s things to be done, who will all get down on their knees to deep clean, and who sometimes look like they will sock each other in the face, only to be found cackling at their phones & sharing a cigarette 5 minutes later.

What can I say. We are just a bunch of ordinary people dreaming of doing extraordinary things.
And what more can we ask for when we have people to dream with us. Every damn day.

This one is for the team 🩵

06/10/2026

✨✨

03/10/2026

Just another day, putting together beautiful food for people.
Not just beautiful, but also local, seasonal, clean, small batch, traceable, hand-made food. What more can one ask for?
Here’s everything that’s on these platters…

Cheese:
- Tomme de Semancheri
- Queso Coromandel
- Provolone Dulce
- Marinated Madras Feta
- 1/277, Bloomy Rind
- String Cheese
- Scamorza Affumicata
- Madras Pepper Jack
- Flavoured Labneh

Condiments
- Balsamic Onion Relish
- Basil Pesto
- Sun-dried Tomatoes
- Thai Sweet Chilli
- Honey Mustard
- Mushroom Pâté
- Beet & ButterBean Hummus
- Fig Preserve
- Salted Caramel
- Lime Curd

Crackers
- Multigrain
- Bajra & chilli
- Sourdough sticks & stars

Fresh Produce
- Strawberries
- Dragon Fruit
- Grapes, green & purple
- Figs
- Olives
- Pennywort leaves
- Cherry Tomatoes, red & yellow

Flowers
- Ixora
- Honolulu Creeper

It takes about an hour to put these platters together & I’ll bet my bottom dollar that it won’t take as long for guests to run through them.
Like I said, just another day of Everyday Beautiful in our world.

20/09/2026

A rainy day has an uncanny ability to make one hanker for something warm, comforting, familiar & homely.

How then, does this plate called Schmaltz & Jhol - what a mouthful - tick all those boxes?!

It started with us thinking we didn’t want the wastage that came with dressing a full chicken into boneless breasts & what-not.

What would we do with all those bones?
Make stock or broth, without doubt.

But maybe, maybe that broth could be levelled up into a savoury, somewhat spicy Jhol.
Nutrition & Flavour? Heck yes.

The Jhol also gave us a great way to poach the breast.

I often say chicken breast can so easily become like Bata chappals (no offence Bata).
But a tasty liquid to poach a breast can mitigate that problem to a large extent.

And then, there is the skin. The other part of a whole chicken that’s often wasted.
Enter Schmaltz. It’s nothing short of genius to cook down the skin and release all of those fats until it becomes what I like to refer to as “Chicken Ghee”. Insane use of the skin imo.

So the rice gets tossed in the Schmaltz.
The Jhol is served on the side.
The poached breast has a schmaltz & preserved lemon “chimichurri” on it.
And the chutney is a fiery mono-esque chutney which is often a great accompaniment to Jhol.

The Schmaltz allows the flavours of the chicken to sing right through the dish in a just-below-the-counter sorta way.
You can’t quite put your finger on what everything tastes that little bit better.
It’s the Schmaltz, my friends.

And just like that , a plate that’s called Schmaltz & Jhol is like a Nose to Tail version of Chicken Curry Rice and takes inspiration from a many places.

Perfect for this rainy Sunday afternoon!

07/09/2026

In a conversation this morning, I jokingly told someone that most people think of our menu as being heavily Meat centric.

This might well be our own fault because I have a tendency to highlight & wax eloquent about the meats often.
What I don’t do often enough is talk about those Vegetarian plates that took as much learning & even more intention to put together.
How come more? Because we didn’t want to give in to the usual.
The Botanist’s Diet is a showcase of the fascinating world of Plant Families.
While many of these vegetables feature in our every day meals, we most often don’t even know they are related. This plate brings the familial connection to the forefront, using varied cooking techniques.

This plate takes inspiration from the idea of Companion Plants in a garden. Growing certain plants side by side makes for less pest attacks, less weeding and a healthier garden.

The family Amaranthaceae is wide & varied including Beetroot | Spinach | Amaranth | Quinoa | Globe Amaranth | Cockscomb

The Brassica family includes species where the roots, stems, leaves, flowers & seeds are food.
Root - Turnip, Radish | Stem - Kolhrabi | Leaves - Cabbage, Kale | Flowers - Cauliflower, Broccoli | Buds - Brussels Sprouts | Seeds - Mustard

And so we have here - Beets & Brassica

Beet reduction & Radish Cream Sauce, served with charred Bok Choy, roasted Cauliflower & Radish, topped with fried Spinach leaves.
Garnished with popped Amaranth. A beet-stained boiled Egg is optional.

06/09/2026

A Konkan Seafood Thali.

Could just say Konkan Thali and that would imply seafood, but I’m using the word anyway to reiterate that it has more than one “vegetable the sea”.

- Malvani Crab Curry
- Prawns with garlic
- Rava Fish; catch of the day
- Dry Fish or Dry Prawn Thecha

Rice that’s tossed in Hirwa Masala. Sol kadi, without doubt.

It’s been some months without this on our menu & we have forgotten what a great plate this is. Heart, homely, warm & perfect for a lazy Sunday lunch.

30/08/2026

Every once in a way, you sit up and think “Woahmygodd why have I not thought of this before?!”

There is no answer. It’s a rhetorical question that precedes getting up and making it happen that very minute.

1. Banana Bread
We’ve been making Banana bread for 200 years now, I think. It is however a recipe that continues to get tweaked. We moved from Maida to Atta, from white sugar to Jaggery and it remains lactose free. It also contains eggs because I cannot for the life of me imagine a cake without them.

Ever so slightly warm, this bread is all sorts of delicious and is speckled with raisins & walnuts and just the right sweetness.

2. Chocolate Ganache
A ganache is all about the ratio of cream to chocolate. You want it to be rich & decadent, smooth & silky and very importantly something that is can be used for many, many purposes. I think we’ve done alright on that front.

3. Sea Salt
If you have been following us for a bit, you know my fascination for the Salt Flats of Marakannam.
The salt crystals are large, flaky & just delicious.

Salt makes all the difference to sweet, baked goods. It cuts through the sweetness and balances everything out, while bringing a certain extra flavour to everything all at once. What’s not to love?!

And so

4. Warm Banana Bread with Chocolate Ganache & Sea Salt

Everything we already had right in front of us. We just didn’t put them together until now. And ohhmygod, how good is it!

You will have to come try it to find out. On the menu from today. Will print a specials board next week.

29/08/2026

Woke up this morning thinking of a Saturday from some weeks ago. The day The Bookish Buffalo was in conversation with Archana Pidathala

Multiple food books in, Archana has so much to share about the quiet preservation of familial & community culture through the lens of a kitchen.

We picked a bunch of recipes from the book that we would serve for that afternoon. There was no denying that the food came with a generous dose of nostalgia & that particular love language that only food can bring.

Like this Coffee Chocolate Pudding.
Isn’t it funny how the oddest of recipes become a family thing?

Two of Archana’s beautiful books are in our Shop.
The poster was clearly inspired by those gorgeous book covers.

Chippa Karamu
A sweet & spicy tamarind sauce that is bomb in flavour!
It has become a staple in our home now.

We’ve never really cooked from a book with such attention.
The whole kitchen had much fun exploring the recipes and trying our hand at something new.

Vērusenaga Pappu Pachchadi
Best described as an Andhra-style Peanut Butter Relish, it was pretty amazing to see familiar ingredients turn into something surprisingly different.

How lovely to have evenings where we explore books!
That too while it rained outside. Perfect :)

I am an absolute sucker for Cook Books and these are gems!

These Kaima Vada - spicy minced mutton cutlets were so damn good, they now occupy a place of pride on our menu. How special 🩵

Do you follow recipes to the T?
I never do. I’m that person who lies in bed reading cook books and maybe then makes a mish-mash of multiple recipes and then call it mine 🙃

These Kobbari Mițāi - fresh coconut burfi that took me straight back to my own childhood.
Soft, sweet and just sooo good! There are so many variations of this coconut sweet; I love the ones that have a slight crunch from the granulated sugar.

I especially love that the recipe said Food Colour optional.
We used a natural food colour to keep with the nostalgia. No guesses what :)

Archana is just such a lovely person that everyone feels like they know her so well in a minute. This feeling extended to the whole evening and it felt like a big group of friends en

Address

1/277, Semancheri Village, OMR
Chennai
600119

Telephone

09176050562

Website

http://www.thefarmchennai.com/

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