Kala Pickles

The kitchen is at 10, Guruvappa Street in Old Washermanpet. If you walk down the street, you can usually smell whatever is being prepared that day. It might be mango or maybe some chili. We’ve been here a long time, and the building shows its age, but it’s where we do all the work. There are jars everywhere, some waiting to be filled and others sitting out to cure. It’s a lot of manual labor, peeling and cutting and mixing everything by hand. We don’t have big fancy machines doing it for us. It’s just the staff sitting around the big tables, getting the work done. Old Washermanpet is a crowded area, so there’s always noise coming from the street, vendors shouting and cycles passing by. We keep the doors open when it’s hot, which is most of the time. The floors are stone and they get stained from the spices, but that’s just how it goes. People in the neighborhood know us. They see the crates coming in from the market early in the morning. We don’t have a big marketing team or anything like that. We just make the pickles, pack them into the jars, and get them ready for whoever is buying them that week. It’s a lot of salt and oil and hard work, but it’s what we know how to do here on Guruvappa Street.