Pure. Honest. boCHE Paniyam Sets the Rule: Dining at boCHE 1000 Acres

The tagline at boCHE Toddy Pub says it plainly: Pure. Honest. boCHE Paniyam Sets the Rule. There is no fine dining pretension here, no fusion plating, no menu written to impress. What the Toddy Pub at boCHE 1000 Acres in Meppadi, Wayanad serves is the food that Kerala has always eaten — cooked the way it has always been cooked, with the spices that grow on the plantation surrounding you. For guests staying at one of the best resorts in Wayanad, it is often the meal they remember longest after the trip.

What a Kerala Toddy Pub Actually Is

The toddy shop is one of Kerala's most misunderstood institutions. From the outside it looks like a place to drink. From the inside, it is a place to eat — and the food served alongside toddy in a traditional Kerala kallu shappu is some of the most technically accomplished cooking in the state. The shappu curry — a coconut-based gravy slow-cooked with whatever the day's fresh catch brought in — is the dish that toddy shops built their reputation on. At boCHE Toddy Pub, the shappu curry section of the menu covers King fish, Silopy, Modha, Kera, Karimeen, Prawns, Crab, and more, all priced as per size because the fish comes in daily and the portion depends on what arrived. That is not a menu limitation. That is the toddy shop way.

The boCHE Special Dishes: Start Here

Every guest's first order at the Toddy Pub should come from the boCHE Special Dishes section. These are the dishes the kitchen is built around, the ones that guests photograph and come back for on their next Wayanad resort booking.

• boCHE Special Pothumkal (₹800) — a whole roasted preparation that is the centrepiece of any table. Order this first and plan everything else around it.
• boCHE Special Fish Pollichathu (as per size) — fish marinated in a masala paste, wrapped in banana leaf, and slow-cooked until the leaf chars and the fish inside is perfectly steamed in its own juices. This is the Kerala dish that guests from outside the state ask about most.
• boCHE Special Non-Veg Plater (₹999) — the best way to try a range of the kitchen's strengths in one order. Shared between two, it covers the table.
• boCHE Special Sea-Food Plater (₹1,299) — the seafood version of the above, ideal for guests who want to understand the full range of what Wayanad's coastal supply chain delivers to a highland kitchen.
• boCHE Special Thala Curry (as per size) — slow-cooked head curry, deeply spiced, the kind of dish that takes hours to prepare and minutes to understand why it does.

The Fish Section: Kerala's Greatest Category

The fish menu at boCHE Toddy Pub is where the kitchen's range becomes clear. Across King fish, Silopy, Modha, Kera, Karimeen, Prawns, and Crab, the pub offers every major preparation style of the Kerala toddy shop tradition: fry, mulakitathu (red chilli curry), shappu curry (coconut gravy), and paal curry (milk-based white curry). The Karimeen — pearl spot fish, indigenous to Kerala's backwaters — is available in all four styles. For guests unfamiliar with Kerala fish preparations, Karimeen shappu curry is the most representative introduction: the fish is delicate, the coconut gravy is aromatic with curry leaves and green chilli, and it pairs naturally with Kallapam or steamed rice from the Rice and Bread section of the menu.

Kappa, Puttu, and the Kerala Carbohydrate

Kerala's approach to carbohydrates is not rice-centric in the way most of India's cuisines are. Kappa (tapioca), Puttu (steamed rice cylinders with coconut), Palkappa (tapioca in milk), Kallapam (toddy-fermented rice pancake), and Porotta are all on the menu at the Toddy Pub and all serve a different function. Kappa with beef — Palkappa with beef is ₹300 — is the most Kerala-specific combination on the entire menu: tapioca cooked until soft and mixed with slow-roasted beef, seasoned with pepper and curry leaves. It is not a dish that exists anywhere else in the world quite the way it does in Wayanad. Guests who stay at boCHE 1000 Acres and have never eaten it before consistently describe it as the most unexpected food discovery of their trip.

Chicken: The Everyday Standard

The chicken section covers the full Kerala preparation range — Chicken curry (₹190), Chicken shappu curry (₹210), Chicken roast (₹180), Kozhi kurumulak (₹200, black pepper chicken), Kadayi chicken (₹220), and the Chicken kizhi porotta (₹270) — a Kerala street food classic where a layered porotta is wrapped with chicken masala inside a banana leaf parcel and pressed on a griddle until the outside is crisp and the inside is steaming. For guests who want a single dish that represents Kerala's evolved street food tradition, the kizhi porotta is it.

Dining Inside a Tea Plantation

What separates the boCHE Toddy Pub from every other restaurant serving Kerala food in Wayanad is the setting. The pub sits inside the boCHE 1000 Acres estate in Meppadi — surrounded by the same tea gardens, spice plantations, and forest cover that produce the cardamom, pepper, and vanilla in the kitchen's spice blends. Guests who spend a day on the estate doing adventure activities in Wayanad — jeep safari, zipline, ATV rides, sky cycling — arrive at the Toddy Pub with an appetite built in the plantation itself, and they eat surrounded by the landscape that flavored what is on the table. That context is not something any standalone restaurant in Wayanad can replicate. It is the specific thing that makes dining at boCHE 1000 Acres what it is.

The Toddy Pub is open to both resort guests and day visitors. If you are planning a stay in Wayanad and want to build a visit around the food, browse our Wayanad resort packages at boCHE 1000 Acres — several include a meal at the Toddy Pub as part of the experience. For day visitors, the pub is accessible at boCHE 1000 Acres, Meppadi, Wayanad.