Ponnar Shankar Restaurant

Our restaurant is right on the Mettur Main Road in Omalur. If you find the Canara Bank, you’ve basically found our front door. Being on the main road in Salem means there’s constant traffic, mostly heavy trucks and buses moving through at all hours. We open up the shutters every morning and start by getting the coffee going for the early birds. The smell from the kitchen starts to fill the air pretty early on. We have a lot of local regulars who stop by for a quick bite before heading to their jobs or the bank. The building is a simple one, nothing too modern or flashy, but it does the job for what we need. We spend a lot of time cleaning the tables and making sure the floor is swept because of all the dust that blows in from the road. It’s more of a family-style environment here, where everyone knows their role. One person handles the billing, a couple of us stay in the kitchen, and someone else is always cleaning up after the rush. We don’t have a big marketing budget or anything fancy like that. Word of mouth around Omalur is how most people find out about us. Sometimes it gets really hot in the afternoons, and we just keep the ceiling fans running full blast to keep the air moving. It’s a lot of hard work, and some days are definitely more tiring than others, but it’s our livelihood. We just try to provide a decent place for people to sit down and have a meal while they’re traveling.