Malgudi Cafe: The South Indian Restaurant That Doesn’t Mind the Heat

Dishes from Malgudi Cafe / Photograph by Ted Ngheim

On one of the hottest days of summer, we went out to eat vada and masala dosa smeared with curry-spiked potatoes and blazing red chili pudi because it was already a hundred degrees in the shade, and fighting fire with fire seemed like a reasonable thing to do.

At Malgudi Cafe, the doors were open to the heat. Portable AC units had been set up, so when you walked through the space you moved from hot, through rivers of cool, metallic, processed air, and back to hot again. And for a couple of years now, this small South Indian vegetarian restaurant in Exton has written its menu exactly the same way — shifting from hot to cool and back again.

The vada were crisp from the fryer — savory lentil doughnuts touched with black pepper that we pulled apart with our fingers and dipped in a soup-thin, sweet-hot sambar slick with ghee. The idlis were spongy and flavorless — just a vehicle for eating pale green coconut chutney, but comforting in their simple blandness. Like eating white bread with jam when you’re just too lazy to cook anything else.

Malgudi’s menu is for grazers. There are combos and platters, shaved onion bhajis, and thick uttapam pancakes topped with shredded vegetables, tomatoes, and green chilis. The dosas — whether rolled hollow, folded around a bare sprinkling of onions or cheese, or folded in half over a filling of fiery masala-spiced potatoes — are served crisp at the edges with that lace-like lentil batter tuile.

Strangely, though, the larger a dish gets, the better the kitchen performs. It’s traditionally meant for breakfast, but I ate a plate of pale yellow kesari bath sweetened with crushed pineapple, cashews, and golden raisins so fast it was like I was trying to win a bet. And the poori sagu — a chunky, mashed potato curry with hot chilis and onions, pinched up with folds of deep-fried and paper-thin wheat bread — was rich, complex but not muddled, hot and sharp with spice, and comforting as a weighted blanket.

So did any of it make Philly’s hottest days more bearable? Of course not. But Malgudi made it easy to forget about the heat for a minute or an hour, focused on the play of hot and cold, sweet and spicy; the breaths of air from the fans; and the bright colors in the dining room. I didn’t love everything, but I liked a lot of it (that poori sagu in particular), and when we were done, picking up a couple of go-cups of mango lassi for the road certainly made the drive home sweeter.
2 Stars — Come if you’re in the neighborhood

Rating Key

0 stars: stay away
★: come if you have no other options
★★: come if you’re in the neighborhood
★★★: come from anywhere in Philly
★★★★: come from anywhere in America

Published as “Embracing the Heat” in the September 2025 issue of Philadelphia magazine.