Sonai Dayning Hall

Our place is in the Desai Building on Jawaharlal Nehru Road, right in Somwar Peth. We are quite close to KEM Hospital, so we get a lot of people who are visiting patients or working long shifts there. It’s a quiet enough street compared to others in Pune, but we stay busy. The dining hall is simple. We have long tables where people sit together sometimes. It’s not the kind of place where you stay for hours. People come in, eat their meal, and then head back out to whatever they were doing. We keep the water jugs filled and the plates moving. The kitchen is right at the back and you can usually hear the pressure cooker going off. We don't have fancy air conditioning, just some fans that keep the air moving on hot days. Sometimes the service is a bit slow if we have a big group come in all at once, but we try our best to keep up. The building itself is an older one, so it has that specific smell of old stone and cooking spices. We don’t have a big sign outside, just enough for people to find us. It’s a practical place for a honest meal. We’ve been part of this neighborhood for a while and we know most of the people who walk through that door.