Bhubaneswar Food Guide

See also my main post on Bhubaneswar as well as my post on Puri, Konark, and Cuttack and my post with recommended books, music, and films from Odisha. 

Table of contents:

Intro

Temple food

Odia Restaurants

Breakfast, snacks, street food, and sweets

Coffee and cafes

Introduction

Bhubaneswar is an excellent place to eat. I mostly ate Odia food here and I loved it. There are a surprising number of good restaurants offering Odia cuisine that are nice and clean while still being inexpensive, and one in particular was really great. There’s great food to be had at cheaper, grungier places too, but I mostly avoided them for hygiene reasons. The best food I had was at temples, though, the temple food is insanely good, but unfortunately the hygiene was not. I also mostly avoided street food, though there are local specials, I just didn’t find them that interesting and am scared of getting sick (and the consensus is that Cuttack is the better street food destination). Thankfully despite several questionable meals, I never got sick. 

And I would rank Odia sweets as my favorite sweets in India. I actually loved many of them, which is a big statement from me, as I generally think Indian sweets are disgustingly sweet (the best sweets I had were in Puri, though). 

There’s also really good coffee grown in Odisha which a few cafes serve, though the quality is hit and miss.

I don’t know of any home chefs who host people for meals (though our Airbnb had a cook who sometimes made some great Odia dishes), nor do I know of any high end Odia meal in town (like the amazing Odia meal I once had at Bombay Canteen in Mumbai). I also don’t know of places offering tribal food, though I had some good stuff at the tribal festival which happens in January.

I’ll cover all categories while going in some order of priority. But first some general notes on Odia food.

A lot of Odias are a bit sensitive to being in Bengal’s shadow. Fair enough. I feel bad adding fuel to the fire but when people ask me what Odia cuisine is like, I tell them it’s similar to Bengali cuisine but less oily and more rustic. Not totally fair on a number of levels, one being that the top meal I had in Bengal was in a village where the food was rustic and not oily. But for a broad description of the commercially available food, it’s not a bad way to explain it. 

There are a lot of similarities in the cuisines, and claims about who introduced what to whom. Odia cooks were employed in Bengal and may have introduced Odia elements into Bengali cuisine. But the similarities probably mostly stem from being neighboring regions. 

A big similarity is the prominence of mustard oil and paste. It is also seafood heavy, though as a vegetarian that didn’t apply to what I ate. There are dishes cooked in leaves in both cuisines (patrapoda in Odisha, similar to Bengal’s paturi). Banana flower dishes are common in both cuisines. Fried pumpkin blossom. Sweet chutneys served in thalis. Rice instead of bread, for the most part. Sun dried lentil things (badi in Odisha, bori in Bengal). Panch phoran (though it’s not the same formulation across the states). I could go on, and to be honest I’d have a harder time telling you how the cuisines are different.

(Wikipedia says tamarind and curry leaves are more popular closer to the Andhra border. Makes sense.)

Similarly, the Odia sweets can be described as similar to the chenna based Bengali sweets but less sweet and more rustic and much yummier, but maybe there’s just an urban/rural divide here and I’d get similar stuff in smaller towns in Bengal. 

There’s also a big debate over whether it was the Odias or the Bengalis who invented rasgulla which I find hilarious because rasgulla is terrible wherever you get it! 

I can’t be bothered with these “debates” but the historicity here is actually pretty interesting. The common narrative that I had heard over the years is that the techniques to split milk (that is, separating the solid curds from liquid whey and thus making cheese) were known in ancient India, but curdled milk was considered to be spoiled and taboo. It wasn’t until the Portuguese came to Bengal and started making cheese that the taboos broke down and eventually coagulated milk products became okay, likely with Muslim sweetmakers leading the way. Soon enough there was the trend of chenna based Bengali sweets (as opposed to khoya based sweets elsewhere in north India). 

(Somehow paneer spread around the same time in Mughal areas. The history here is also murky. And in case you were wondering, the ancient root words of chenna mean “coagulate.” Or some say it descends from “shana” which means “kneading.”) 

The Odia narrative is that rasgulla and other curdled milk sweets are served in the mahaprasad at Jagannath Temple, and there are oral traditions about them (such as a folk story about Laxmi, annoyed that Krishna went on the chariot without her at the Rath Yatra, refusing to let him back into the temple and only yielding when he gives her rasgullas), and perhaps the tribal influence at Puri meant a different set of Hindu customs were followed. It’s possible these dishes only became part of the mahaprasad later, though that seems surprising considering they are strict about ingredients and only use pre-Columbian exchange produce. There may even be literary evidence of chenna sweets being made in Odisha at the time, such as references to it in an Odia version of the Ramayana from the 15th century. 

But perhaps those references were added to later texts and aren’t in the original versions. I went through some of the claims that Odia writer Asit Mohanty included in his lengthy article on the subject (Mohanty’s work was also submitted by the Odisha government in an effort to get a GI tag for rasgulla, which they eventually received). He cites the scene in the 15th century Odia version of the Ramayana where Ram is served various chenna sweets by a sage in the forest. But when discussing this Ramayana version, he says, “Pundit Govinda Rath was the first scholar to edit and publish it. He was born in the Patapur (Padmanavapur) sasan in Banki in 1848.” So, it’s fairly logical to assume that the chenna references were added later. There are a lot of other historical references in that article, but they are more recent, used to prove that the Odia rasgulla predates the Bengali one, not necessarily that chenna predates the Portuguese, which is what I want to know. There appear to be older references to rasgulla, but it is likely that those refer to a sweet that may be similarly shaped but is not chenna based like modern rasgullas. 

Personally I think the Odia case for ancient chenna production is weak, but the fact that chenna is served to the gods at the Jagannath temple even though this is explicitly prohibited in Hindu texts is interesting.

I’d love to see this investigated further. If you want more, this article gives a decent overview, including info about the GI tags. Unfortunately everything I read on the topic is like “The Bengalis claim there is no evidence that the Odias were using chenna before the Portuguese came, but the Odias claim there is evidence in these 500 year old literary works” and then it never goes into that evidence. Around half the people (at least those who care enough to comment) blindly believe the Bengali claims, half blindly believe the Odia claims, and then a small sliver of enlightened people are like “Now now let’s be mature, we shouldn’t engage in food chauvinism, it doesn’t matter who invented rasgulla, what matters is that it’s delicious and both states make wonderful versions that differ from the other, and blah blah etc etc.” And I’m all alone thinking rasgulla is gross and just wanting to understand the historical development of cheese in India.

I looked at some academic papers but they didn’t help, just giving the same contradictory claims and not answering the questions I had. One paper really lost me with its “Health benefits of rasgulla” section:

“Folic acid and thiamine content of rasgulla provide energy and good for brain functioning; diabetic patients can also consume this owing to the low glycemic index. Dietary fibres present in chhana makes it to accelerate the metabolism process. The principal ingredient of rasgulla is milk, which comprises of calcium (Ca) and vitamin D; thus consumption of rasgulla aids in strong teeth and bone formation. Milk also contains 80% casein protein as well as 20% whey protein; the essential amino acids content of these protein makes rasgulla a protein-rich product. Magnesium (Mg) and potassium (K) present in chhana help in lowering blood sugar and blood pressure level respectively. Consumption of immediately prepared rasgulla in hot condition helps in fight with various stomach-related disease like dysentery.” 

So yeah.

Anyway let’s get back to the important matter: the food in Odisha is delicious, and I loved that we got a good range of interesting local, seasonal, healthy vegetable dishes without having to hunt them down.

It’s also the only part of the country I’ve been to outside of the northeast where local restaurants have good mushroom dishes made with varieties other than button mushrooms, and local mushroom varieties are sold in the market.

Interestingly, a lot of restaurants advertise themselves as using no garlic or onions, much more than I’ve seen elsewhere, though maybe they’re just as prevalent elsewhere but I never thought about it because of how they are coded with the names (i.e. having Jain or some signifier I didn’t pick up on in the name). 

Also, I was there in winter so I didn’t try much of the Odisha signature pakhala bhat (fermented rice porridge), which is more of a summer thing. I thought that was because it only ferments properly in the summer, but apparently that’s not true and it’s really eaten a lot in summer because of its cooling properties. A few places did have it, but the one time I tried it (at Dalma) it just seemed like watered down yogurt and rice, and not properly fermented, so I avoided it after that, but maybe I should have tried it again.

That’s about it for my broad observations so I’ll jump into the recommendations.

Temple Food

I’ll begin with the greatest meal I had in all of Odisha, and one of the top meals I’ve ever had in India: the food at the Ananta Vasudeva temple in the old town. Though the food at Jagannath temple in Puri is more famous, there you only get a small selection of the food that they serve to the gods every day (at Puri we got plain rice, sweet rice, and two vegetable dishes, plus dessert, see that post for more info). Here you get a full-fledged divine meal, with ten or so dishes, and it was all incredible. I believe this is only for lunch, and it starts around 11am. See my main Bhubaneswar post for recommendations on other things to do in the old town (basically temples), though that stuff is all best in the morning/evening rather than mid-day.

Like Puri, the area the temple food is served in is called Ananda Bazar (pleasure market), and you buy the food from separate vendors, quite different from most temples I’ve been to where you sit and they serve you, usually for free or a nominal fee. Our meal was pricey by temple standards, I think we paid around 500 rupees for two people, but you pay per dish and portion size (you don’t have to get a dozen things). As a non-Hindu I was not allowed into the Ananda Bazar in Puri so I can’t say how the setup compares, but it was such a fun and exciting atmosphere here. This was my top experience in Bhubaneswar.

(I just wish they covered the food. It was left out in the open and there were tons of flies. Also, I didn’t mind, but you have to sit on the floor which isn’t the cleanest, so dress accordingly.)

It was interesting that there were numerous vendors with similar offerings, but they weren’t exactly the same, with some places offering a few more dishes than others, and a few dishes that seemed unique to one or two vendors. I initially thought they make each dish in giant batches and then it goes to different vendors, but my wife spoke with some of them who said each vendor makes their own food, and the taste will differ from vendor to vendor. You also have to get your banana leaf from a different vendor you get food from. 

I found a bit more info online, but not a ton (here’s one good article, and I gathered more info here). There are 300 people who work at the temple making the prasad. Also, there are 300 Brahmin families that work at the temple, most of them with the surname Mohapatra. (300 people in the kitchen, one from every family? Or were these numbers mixed up?) Non-kitchen jobs include cutting veggies and making clay pots for cooking. Surprisingly, they make new clay pots every single day so that leftover food doesn’t accidentally get mixed in! 

The temple kitchens apparently serve 5,000 people a day, or 10,000, or 15,000, depending on who you ask, with the higher numbers being more frequently cited for festival days. Even at the low end these numbers sound high? It was pretty busy when I was there on a Saturday at around 12:30pm, but I feel like at the most there were only 100 people around? They do deliveries too, but it was hard for me to imagine how it adds up.

I wanted to look in the kitchen, but I was shooed away when snooping around at the temple. I don’t know if this is because only Hindus are allowed in the area or if they do it to everyone out of fear of ritual pollution or just because they don’t want people getting in the way. Fair enough!

We got from a vendor in the back that looked like they had the most stuff, and then we got a different chutney from the vendor next to them. I have no insight on whose food tastes the best, I’m sure it’s all good! 

I wish I could better describe what we got, but I didn’t take notes. It was all ridiculously good, though. Very light and super flavorful while being mildly spiced. Mustard and coconut flavors stood out, and there’s a bit of sweetness to many of the dishes. Like the food at Puri, there’s no garlic or onions and no post-Columbian exchange ingredients (they did serve chili on the side, though!), so there are a lot of gourds and root vegetables. There was plain rice, sweet rice, dal, chickpeas, three vegetable dishes, date chutney, and what I’d describe as a mixed fruit raita (dahi pachedi, this was amazing). For dessert we got a rabdi-like reduced milk thing, very creamy and perfectly sweetened, it was excellent.

I regret not going back. We planned to go again on one of our final days, but we were visiting a wedding right after our trip and my wife was afraid of getting sick. A reasonable fear, but this is one of those meals that’s worth the risk. I will definitely be back one day!

We went to a few other temples to eat. Though it’s a much smaller spread, the food at the Baramunda Kali temple (with a big kitschy demon face as its entrance, awesome) was very good. You don’t have to go out of your way for it, but it’s in the vicinity of the Udayagiri and Khandagiri caves as well as the Kala Bhoomi Crafts Museum. Recommended for another temple meal. 

Odia Restaurants

I’ll start with the nicer places then will discuss my meal at the delicious but grungier Ballaree at the end. The food at these restaurants is really a different cuisine from the temple food. Even putting aside the ingredients used in the restaurants that aren’t used at the temple (garlic, onion, chili, potatoes, etc, not to mention meat and fish), here it’s spicier, isn’t sweet, uses oil instead of ghee (probably mustard oil), and just has a different set of dishes, or tastes very different even when they’re the same.

For nice but still very reasonably priced Odia restaurants, my top pick is easily Odisha Hotel. They have a number of locations (including branches in other cities). We only went to the original branch at Saheed Nagar. Downstairs has a more old school local restaurant feel, and you can even see the original chalk board menu, but both times we went they directed us upstairs which is fancier and air conditioned. A nicer space than the other restaurants we went to, and the food was well presented with brass plates (or something like that).

The first time we went was on Makar Sankranti so to start the meal they served a special dish called makara chaula, which is soaked ground rice mixed with milk, jaggery, a variety of fruits, and black pepper, it was so good! 

The menu here has thalis and a la carte dishes. One thali could easily feed two people, but no thali sharing is allowed. I think I’d recommend two meals here, one just getting thalis, and another getting a range of a la carte dishes. If you only go once, I’d say get a mix of the thali and a la carte dishes, though it’s way too much food.

The thali included rice, dal, fried pumpkin flower, raita, a delicious sweet and tangy chutney made of jujube, and small portions of greens, mashed potatoes, and mixed veggies. On a return visit we got the “pure veg” no garlic or onion thali, available Monday and Thursday, which was pretty similar but had slightly different side veggies, a different sweet tangy chutney, and dalma instead of dal. To try some of the a la carte dishes, we added on mushroom besara, which was delicious and very mustardy, and the light and refreshing dahi baigan. 

Overall the food was very good and I would go back right now if I could! They also have some local sweets but we were always too full to try any.

I went to a few other good restaurants but none were quite as good. Dalma would be my runner up though, and I would go back. They also have a number of locations and we went to the original on Sachivalaya Marg. We got a thali, which was similar to the one at Odisha Hotel, but maybe 13% less good. It gets bonus points for the wood apple chutney. I loved that. They also had mushroom patrapoda (patrapoda dishes are grilled in leaves), which Odisha Hotel did not have, but they didn’t serve it in the leaf which made me wonder if it was actually cooked in the leaf. It was good but not as good as the one I had at Ballaree (see below). The pakhala bhat seemed like rice in watery yogurt rather than actually fermented, but I don’t know what I’m talking about. They had some fun sounding daily specials written on a white board, including unusual desserts, though I was too full for those. 

We also went to Nimantran, run by Odisha’s tourism department to showcase local foods. We heard good things but our meal was a bit disappointing. Maybe we just ordered wrong. We got daily specials, jackfruit tarkari and chenna tarkari. They were okay but quite generic compared to everything else we ate in Odisha. More garam masala-y. However, we also got ambula rai, a kind of sweet, salty, tangy, mustardy raita made with sun dried mango, and it was outstanding. This was the only menu we saw it on (also a daily special). So that redeemed the meal. I would come back.

One other place we went was Desiii By Smrutisree in Patia. The thali was solid (similar to the others), the mushroom patrapoda was properly served in the leaves and was better than the one at Dalma but not as good as Ballaree, and the fried pumpkin flower was kinda bland. A decent place if you’re nearby, but it didn’t stand out and the location is out of the way. 

All of these places were fairly busy at lunch time, and it seemed to be almost entirely locals eating at them.

The one nice place we planned to check out but didn’t have time for was Kanika at the Mayfair hotel. It’s probably the fanciest Odia restaurant in town, at what looks like the nicest hotel in town (I’ve heard it’s a beautiful place to walk around with a lot of nice artwork). The prices here are at least double anywhere else, but it’s relatively inexpensive for five star hotel restaurants in India.

We also had one meal at a grungier, more “local” restaurant called Ballaree. The food here was really delicious and quite unlike the above-mentioned places. I recommend it, but it also comes with bigger hygiene concerns, so it’s up to you. Probably fine, but I wouldn’t send my parents here.

We got a veg thali with mushroom patrapoda as the centerpiece. The patrapoda dishes, grilled in leaves (I think pumpkin?) until they char and lend a smokey flavor to the food, are the specialty here. The mushrooms (I believe straw mushrooms) were excellent, and this was easily the best patrapoda dish of the three that we tried in Odisha. The rest of the food was good too, and our thalis had quite a spread with fried veggies, greens, dal, mashed potatoes, badi chura (I really liked this), a gravy with potato and pointed gourd, and an interesting thin chutney with peanut and potato that I think is called aloo poda padaw.

Patrapoda dishes didn’t seem that common but I saw a place called Hotel Desi Patrapoda at Ekamra Haat. Also at Ekamra Haat is the much beloved Kaka Hotel. Unfortunately I was never hungry the few times I ended up at Ekamra Haat, but if you want more cheap local eats these could be good options.

Breakfast, Snacks, Street Food, Sweets

I’ll start with my favorite category here, which is pitha. Pithas are generally sweet starchy things that make for good breakfasts or snacks. They are often made with rice flour and additional ingredients frequently include coconut and jaggery, though there are many varieties and some savory ones. Some are fried but many are just steamed. You get similar things also called pithas in Bengal and Assam and other nearby regions, and Kerala for some reason, but you also get similar things not called pitha in a lot of other places (some are basically idlis/dosas, and they remind me a lot of Konkani sweet starchy snacks as well), and they’re similar to things you get in Southeast Asia too (such as Thai khanom). 

These get less attention than Indian milk sweets, but they are much better than the milk sweets, mainly because they are much less sweet on average. Unlike the milk sweets, pithas are usually made at home, though there are places that sell them. It’s very odd to me that the bad Indian sweets are super popular and heavily commodified while the good ones are obscure, hard to find regional things. The world is a confusing place.

A great place to try a range of pithas is Mo Pitha at Saheed Nagar, where there are a lot of street food stalls in the evening. I think they said they open at 6pm but I might have made that up. We got like 8 different things, I don’t know the names, but they were all good. Just get a range. They also have some milk sweets, get those too, they’re better here than at the sweet shops. 

Beyond that I got pithas at some sweet shops and some random stalls next to random temples selling food that they make to give to the deities. And at the tribal fest I went to. They were always good. I didn’t have a bad pitha. 

As for street food and snacks, there’s some good stuff. Nothing that blew me away. 

I like but don’t love dahi bara alu dum, which in addition to trying in Cuttack I had at the corner of the khao galli across from Ekamra Haat. I had some local chaat somewhere, I thought it was good but had too much going on, and it didn’t distinguish itself enough to be worth the food poisoning risk. There’s also the local fritters called bara, I had once or twice but I’m not that into fried food and didn’t find them exciting. Rabi Bara is famous, I never made it there.

Ram Mandir Tiffin Center was a good place for breakfast, or a quick cheap evening snack or meal. You get pan-India stuff, puris, vadas, samosas, dosa, but served Odia style with dalma. And maybe the dosas are really chakuli, I don’t know the difference. They had some Odia sweets too. I liked the fried dough thing. Not novel or special enough to qualify as a must visit, but if you are a big breakfast eater and in the area then it’s a good place to go.

In the old town I really liked a sweets and snacks shop called Bhai Bhai Rasagola. The two highlights were rasabali, which is fried chenna in rabdi, minimally sweetened and quite delicious, and dahi rasgulla, which is rasgulla in a sort of sweet savory yogurt with green chilies, curry leaves, ginger slices, and carrot shavings. Great stuff, the only acceptable form of rasgulla that I’ve discovered thus far. We wanted something savory as well, so we got a upma vermicelli pulao thing, served with dalma and chutney, quite good.

We also got rasabali, dahi rasgulla, samosa, some fried savory thing, chenna poda, and steamed chenna at Nimapara Sweets. I don’t really remember specifics of anything though. I’ll just say I liked it all. Samosas in Odisha are a bit different from elsewhere in the country, but similar to Bengali samosas. 

In the old town around Lingaraj temple there’s the prasad called kora khai, which is caramelized puffed rice. They sell it at tons of small stalls but the one at the famous shop Baiya Kora Khai on Rath road (very close to the great Vaitaul Deul temple) felt more caramely, plus it had a nice spice kick and coconut. I still found it too sweet though. Next time I get some I’ll add salt and very dark chocolate to balance it. This video of how it’s made is awesome. Also, on the same road is Sankar Namkin Shop which makes fresh sev, not unique to Odisha but that was really fun to see anyway.

Coffee & Cafes

Odisha grows coffee, which is surprising to many (as it was to me), but it makes sense once you realize that the coffee growing region of Koraput borders Andhra’s much better known coffee growing Araku region. There are plans to expand coffee production to more regions in Odisha, but for now it seems almost entirely to come from Koraput. 

There are a number of places in Bhubaneswar where you can get coffee from Odisha, served in drinks or in whole beans/powder so you can brew it at home. I’m not a big coffee drinker and only really enjoy iced lattes (which most cafes don’t know how to make, mainly because most Indians don’t understand the concept of cold milk), so I’m not the best judge. And the cafe scene in Bhubaneswar is expectedly not quite up there with the big cities yet (it’s no Nagaland either…), so the quality of what I had was more miss than hit. However I had a few great coffees so I suspect that Odisha grows some pretty good stuff. If you like hot coffee I bet your coffees will be more hit than miss.

The leader in Odisha’s coffee scene is definitely Kruti Coffee. They have a handful of branches in the city, plus a handful more across the state as well as two in Mumbai and one each in Raipur and Jamshedpur. 

Some locations are newer and nicer than others, as you can tell from photos. We went to two. One was in a small space at the Hotel Marigold (the only location that’s on the way to the sightseeing areas, though a few others aren’t far out of the way), and it was brand new when we went and I think still figuring things out because the coffee wasn’t very good. 

But later we went to their flagship location in Patia where they do the roasting, and it was great! Unfortunately there’s no reason for you to go to this part of town, though it is on the way to Cuttack. All we got  was an iced latte, which was delicious. Since my wife makes coffee at home with a South Indian filter machine, we got their filter coffee powder (a mix of arabica and robusta, with 20% chicory) and that was great too, actually one of the best filter coffee blends of the dozens we’ve bought over the years, and very reasonably priced too (much cheaper per gram than their other coffees). We also bought their ragi jaggery butter cookies, and those were very good as well. Unfortunately we didn’t get to try anything else, but they had a good looking range of drinks, including some nice teas, and the baked goods looked pretty good though the food otherwise did not, by my standards.

At the store they sold a wide range of coffee beans/powder, with a mix of single origins and blends, though I found it kinda funny that they all seemed pretty similar in terms of roast level and flavor notes. They also have a variety of drip bags as well as cold brew bags and capsules. You can buy their coffees online too. We were very impressed with what we tried so I feel comfortable recommending whatever sounds good to you within their range. You can buy their coffees online as well.

We regretted that we didn’t get a chance to go back or visit more of their branches. We look forward to going to their Mumbai branch soon. Though as I noted there’s evidently some consistency issues from branch to branch. Hopefully my first experience was an outlier.

There is also the state-run Koraput Coffee. I think they only have one sit down branch in the city at the TDCCOL building (there was another we went to at Shakti Bazaar which closed down), in addition to a stall at the botanical garden, plus a cafe in Koraput and a stall at the beach in Puri. They aren’t as fancy as Kruti and the cafe isn’t a place you’d want to sit and hang out for a while, but it’s still worth checking out for people into coffee. Quite inexpensive, too. I’m big into post-meal walks, and we walked here after eating at the great Odisha Hotel restaurant, so I recommend that.

Koraput Coffee is an initiative by the Tribal Development Cooperative Corporation of Odisha and the shop which the cafe is in also sells food items and crafts from tribal regions. We bought cashews, honey, millet cookies, and a few other things, I thought it was all good. And it seems like a good cause, but I didn’t look into it much.

As for the coffee, we got iced lattes twice and the first time it was pretty good but the second time they didn’t use cold milk (a common problem) so it was not good. We also took home one of their blends to make with the South Indian filter machine. This was 100% arabica, with no chicory, so not ideal for the brewing method, but I liked it. They had a few different roast options. Overall I felt good about the quality here, people with broader taste in coffee than I have may end up happy. I don’t know.

There are a few other roasters in town, and some of them do supply to local cafes, but none of those cafes turned out to be great, or at least none knew how to make iced lattes. The one nice looking coffee oriented cafe we didn’t make it to was Java Clinic. If you really like coffee and want to buy beans directly from a roaster, you can look into Odyssa, Assava, and Deomali. 

We did go to a few other cafes that didn’t have great coffee but were decent enough spaces to work from or hang out, though they mostly weren’t conveniently located to retreat to in the hot sunny hours between morning and evening sightseeing. Location wise, the best for that was probably Bocca Cafe, on Janpath road near the train station (currently labeled on gmaps as Bocca Book Store for some reason), which had mediocre coffee but surprisingly had good local kombucha.  

The nicest cafe we went to was easily Ekaiva Bakehouse & Studio, though it’s not really close to anywhere else you’d want to go in the city. Our iced latte was just okay, though we think that may have been because the ice melted too much before it got to the table. They used Odisha beans, so it’s worth trying. But otherwise the food and drinks here are definitely the best in town for this sort of fare (which my wife wanted as she wanted a break from spicy food). The Turkish eggs were quite good, served with good homemade bread, and the fresh tamarind juice with ginger, peanuts, and honey was excellent. I complain a lot that cafes just ape western menus and don’t do anything with local produce, and that they rarely use fresh juice, so this was a nice treat. There are a lot of other homemade juices as well, and in general the quality of the food and drinks seemed good, a cut above everywhere else in town. It’s a nice space, too. My only complaint is that they allow smoking in the outdoor area and the indoor seating is very limited. 

Other than that, we enjoyed going to hang at Three Chariots (they use local beans though we thought it was just okay, overall probably above average F&B if not as good as Ekaiva) and Cafe 16 Satyanagar (more mediocre but above average for Bhubaneswar, plus they had an impressive bookshelf with an interesting section of local books). Both were decent spaces to work and had a local community cultural center feel to them.