Bengaluru Hotels Turn to Automation to Meet Soaring Demand for South Indian Cuisine

Bengaluru, June 23, 2025: In the heart of India’s Silicon Valley, a quiet transformation is reshaping hotel kitchens. With a shortage of skilled culinary staff and increasing demand for traditional South Indian cuisine, hotels across Bengaluru are turning to automation and kitchen technology to maintain quality, speed, and consistency.

From popular dishes like pongal and vada to labor-intensive sweets like Mysore Pak, machines are now doing much of the heavy lifting in both mid-range and luxury hotel kitchens. The shift is especially visible in properties that serve hundreds of guests daily, including high-traffic breakfast buffets and banquet operations.

Why the Shift Is Happening

The demand for authentic regional food in hotels has grown tremendously, driven by both local diners and tourists seeking a genuine taste of Karnataka’s cuisine. At the same time, the hospitality industry is grappling with a shortage of trained cooks, especially those skilled in making complex, time-consuming dishes by hand.

This imbalance has prompted Bengaluru’s hotels to embrace automation as a practical solution.

“We have to serve over 500 people for breakfast, and hand-making every vada or dosa simply isn’t feasible anymore,” says a head chef at a well-known business hotel in central Bengaluru. “We’ve introduced automated vada machines that shape and fry them with minimal human input. It saves time and labor, but we still have a chef checking the taste and adjusting seasoning.”

Machines Meet Tradition

While machines now prepare the bulk of items like pongal, upma, and idlis, many chefs are careful to emphasize that authentic flavor and traditional recipes still rely on human hands. For example:

The final step of adding ghee to Mysore Pak continues to be done by experienced chefs, ensuring the texture and flavor remains true to heritage standards.

Sambar and rasam are still cooked manually in large batches to retain the right balance of spices, which many say machines cannot yet replicate.

The goal is not to replace chefs but to augment their work—allowing them to focus on taste and presentation while machines handle repetitive prep work.

Investment in Kitchen Technology

Modern hotel kitchens in Bengaluru are also investing in combi-ovens, steamers, and programmable cookers. These devices are capable of steaming large quantities of rice, roasting spices evenly, and preparing biryani without constant supervision.

Restaurants and hotels that once hesitated to spend on automation are now seeing it as a necessary step. Even classic eateries such as Konark Hotel—a well-known name for South Indian meals—have embraced modern kitchen tech to handle growing volumes without compromising quality.

Training the Future Chefs

The trend is also impacting culinary education in the city. Institutions like the International Institute of Hotel Management (IIHM), Bengaluru, have introduced modules on food technology, automation, and AI in the kitchen.

Students are now learning how to balance technical skills with traditional cooking, preparing them to work in hybrid kitchens where machines and humans collaborate to produce high-quality meals efficiently.

What It Means for Hospitality

For the hotel industry in Bengaluru, this move toward automation offers multiple benefits:

Improved consistency in food preparation

Reduced dependency on large kitchen staff

Faster service during peak hours

Better hygiene and food safety standards

However, the soul of South Indian cooking—its history, flavor, and craftsmanship—remains firmly in human hands.