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Auroville has several restaurants and cafés which
vary in style, price and quality. Here's a quick guide for the
uninitiated:
Solar Kitchen
The Solar Kitchen is by far Auroville's most popular lunchtime eatery,
serving good, simple food to 300 sit-down diners six days a week. It
delivers a further 600 meals to Auroville's schools, units and outlying
communities at ridiculously low prices compared to other options.
The Coffee Shop
Sometimes also called The Solar Café, the Coffee Shop sits directly
above the Solar Kitchen and offers relatively expensive and luxurious
meals including fresh juices, ice cream and crèpes. It costs nothing to
just sit at one of the Café's rooftop glass tables and enjoy the
setting, which is fabulous. The Café occupies only a fraction of the
vast Solar Kitchen roof, under an elegant green metal and wood sunshade.
During the lunchtime period, visitors will find the café bustling and
chairs scarce. Most make do sitting in pools of shadow cast over
built-in seating blocks, or on the wide low wall running around the edge
of the roof's tiled surface.
Visitor's Centre Cafeteria
Designed to interface with Auroville's increasing stream of visitors,
the Information or Visitor's Centre offers in addition to an information
service a shop, gallery, amphitheatre and café. The café, also on the
pricey side, sells good traditional tea and coffee alongside croissants,
cakes, as well as samosas and other traditional Indian meals, including
the steamed rice cake, idli. A good place to meet outside Auroville
proper, the VC Cafeteria is mostly peopled with package tourists from
nearby towns. For this reason, the Centre is best avoided on weekends
when it sees the bulk of its visitors.
New Creation Corner
Despite being an outdoor restaurant situated on a busy government tar
road, New Creation Corner café manages a very pleasant eating
atmosphere, serving good Indian and western food. The table service is
friendly and quick and prices very reasonable. Many Aurovilians rely
upon NCC for dinner, and evenings usually see it filled to capacity with
community locals. Home-made delicacies like crème caramel or the
cosmopolitan tandoori chicken and chips have given the café/restaurant
a dedicated Auroville following.
Roma's Kitchen
Auroville's answer to an 'expensive restaurant', Roma's offers table
service and a range of North Indian cuisine. Run out of a large
verandah'ed building set away from the road, Roma's landscaped grassy
surrounds lend it an atmosphere of sophistication. The best tables are
found outdoors, close to the grass, where giant low terracotta
lampshades cast a warm subdued light. Diners should allow themselves
ample time for the often busy staff to take orders and prepare meals.
Pour Tous Café
Once the bustling hub of Auroville café life, the Pour Tous café
occupied a quieter role after the Solar Kitchen and Coffee Shop opened.
Today, it serves the steady flow of Aurovilians who come to Auroville's
little supermarket, Pour Tous (For All), to get their food and other
essentials. In a concreted clearing in a giant bamboo grove, the PT
Café serves good tea, coffee and South and North Indian traditional
meals, including idli, dosa and chapathi at old-fashioned prices. With
good cheap food and a warm mellow vibe, the Pour Tous café perfectly
caters to the slightly harried shopper or visitor.
Auriginal Pizzeria
This traditional Italian-style Aurovilian pizzeria serves, amongst other
things, good hot pizza, fresh salads and juices. Dining is rooftop and
quite idyllic. The restaurant's proximity to the ocean sees the dining
area often bathed in a cool sea breeze, and you're high enough to have a
good view of the land and surrounding villages. It's pricey but worth
it, and if you want they'll even home deliver (Auroville area only).
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