Kochi Restaurants Cut Menus and Shut Night Stalls as Commercial LPG Shortage Deepens

Near the Kaloor International Stadium, a restaurant run by a man named Deepak has stopped making dosa and appam. The reason is the commercial LPG shortage across Kerala, which is now pushing kitchens throughout Kochi to cut their menus by as much as 50 percent in an effort to save cooking gas.

Deepak describes the change in plain terms: the menu used to be a list of what the kitchen could cook, and is now a list of what it can afford to heat. Dishes that need a stove burning for hours are the first to go. A live dosa counter means keeping a tawa hot all day, which he calls impossible under the current supply. He says his restaurant would rather stop making dosa and appam than compromise on freshness and quality. Puttu, appam and dosa, staples of a Kerala breakfast, are vanishing from menus because the steamers and tawas consume so much gas. Chinese dishes that depend on high-pressure burners are also dropping off. Biriyani is under strain too, since the long dum process and the large volume of boiling water for rice are costly in fuel.

The shortage has reached online ordering as well. Delivery platforms are showing more items as currently unavailable as restaurants trim their digital menus to match what their kitchens can produce. An official at a prominent food aggregator in Kochi said the situation is slowly worsening and the company is preparing for it. Fewer choices mean fewer orders, the official said, and delivery times are rising noticeably. When fewer restaurants are operating, the remaining ones become a bottleneck, and the whole logistics chain slows.

For delivery workers, that slowdown hits income directly. Sajid, who has delivered food on Kochi's streets for more than three years, says a restaurant may take 40 minutes on one order when it is working with a single induction cooker instead of four gas burners. In that case he can finish only half his usual deliveries. He and his colleagues fear that customers will stop ordering if food arrives late and the choices are thin, and that their jobs will suffer.

Switching to electric cooking is the obvious alternative, but restaurateurs say it is not simple. A hotelier on MG Road, who asked not to be named, said many establishments have old wiring, and high-power appliances can trip the mains or create safety risks. Commercial electricity tariffs and the price of equipment add to the burden. By his figures, a gas dosa tawa costs about ₹1.5 lakh and an electric one about ₹3.5 lakh. Running a gas tawa for roughly 18 hours takes up to one and a half cylinders a day, around ₹1,800 daily or ₹54,000 a month. He estimates the electricity for an electric tawa could reach ₹5,000 a day, nearly ₹1.5 lakh a month, almost three times the gas cost.

Thattukadas, the roadside night stalls, have been hit especially hard because their livelihoods depend on steady late-night sales. Many have closed temporarily or shortened their hours. Josemon, who runs one in Irumpanam, says he is usually open late into the night but no longer has enough cylinders for those hours. His menu has been cut, and he says he is losing many customers as a result.

Some kitchens are returning to firewood and looking for smokeless turbo-stoves, since ordinary wood fires produce heavy smoke that bothers customers and neighbouring shops. Demand has fed profiteering, according to Deepak, who says stoves that usually cost about ₹16,000 are being sold for more than ₹80,000 because sellers know restaurants are desperate. Safety norms limit most restaurants to two or three spare cylinders, so there is effectively no buffer left.

What happens next depends on whether commercial LPG supply is restored. Without that, the report warns, the fresh-and-hot habit of Kochi's dining scene faces lasting damage, along with the incomes of the cooks, stall owners and delivery riders who depend on it.