Cafes in Ooty and Coonoor

Ooty is where to drop in without planning. Near the market, Sugar Dribble Cafe is a European-style room with outdoor seating, known for cheesecakes, brownies and lemon pie with French and cold coffee. Cocoapods is a chocolate cafe: brownies, banana-honey waffles, white hot chocolate and handmade chocolates to take away. On Elk Hill, Willy's Coffee Pub has a lending library, board games and free wi-fi, and has long been where students and slow travellers settle in for hours over mud pie and banana cake. Le Cafe, in a small food court with an open terrace, serves ramen, pizza, salads and coffee, with a souvenir shop and an imported-goods supermarket next door.

Coonoor cafes are destinations rather than drop-ins. La Belle Vie, in 180 McIver, a colonial bungalow on Gray's Hill near Sim's Park whose records go back to 1875, looks over the tea gardens and the town across 180 degrees; it was a location for the film Kapoor & Sons, and the crème brûlée is the dessert people book for. Café Diem, out at Bandishola on the Kotagiri road, is reached by a walk through the owners' garden on the edge of the Bandi Sholai valley: vegetarian, with sourdough pizza, homemade pasta and eggless desserts, and only a few tables. Cafe Coffee Bean is the low-key option, a small independent room with a valley outlook, homemade cakes and croissant sandwiches.

Between the two, The Culinarium sits among lavender fields in Ketti Valley on the Ooty–Coonoor road: a patisserie, restaurant and bar with vegan ice creams made from garden fruit, and the one cafe in this list with a full bar.

A quick match from the descriptions above.

The Nilgiris have baked in wood ovens since the planters wanted something for tea, and the classic is varkey: a flaky, crunchy biscuit of wheat, ghee and mawa (milk solids), sold warm, in paper, by weight. Ooty varkey carries a GI tag (a protected regional name).

• Crown Bakery, Lower Coonoor: the town's oldest bakery, on the same wood-fired oven since 1880, in a room of wartime clocks and old German glass jars. Honey cake, varkey and old-fashioned breads and cookies.
• West Coast Bakery, Commercial Road, Ooty: one of Ooty's oldest, with varkey in sweet and salt versions, plus cream cakes and cookies.
• Impala Bakery, central Ooty: a no-frills counter of about fifty years, known locally for its crisp square-cut varkey and salt biscuits.

Ooty's other sweet habit is homemade chocolate. King Star at Charing Cross, opposite the Botanical Garden, has made fudge and truffles by hand since 1942; Modern Stores, an Ooty landmark since 1951, pours a thick hot chocolate at its counter. In Coonoor, small shops have hand-poured slabs for decades: nut, cardamom, coffee, chilli.

For South Indian filter coffee, go to the Ooty Coffee House on Commercial Road, an old pure-vegetarian place that brews it from local plantation beans, with dosa and vada sambar on the side. More breakfast places are on the breakfast page.

Tea, though, is what these hills drink. Nilgiri tea is poured at street stalls, in cafes and on the trains: lighter than Assam, less smoky than Darjeeling, with floral notes. Nilgiri orthodox tea, the whole leaf rolled rather than cut, has held a Geographical Indication since 2008. For a guided tasting of single-estate teas, Tranquilitea on Grays Hill, Coonoor, runs ninety-minute sittings by reservation only, about ₹3,100 per couple plus 18% tax; allow several days to book, and longer in April–May and December.