Tanto Trattoria Pizzeria

An Italian Sunday lunch every day

Welcome to Tanto

Italian & Mediterranean restaurant serving healthy food options from vegan, vegetarian to sea food. Pizzas and pastas with choices in organic spelt made only in extra virgin olive oil and choicest of ingredients grown in our kitchen garden. No processed or canned ingredients in any of our dishes. Wood fired pizzas to fresh crunchy raw salads, freshest seafood, brown rice risotto, freshly squeezed fruit juices are only some of the options on our varied menu.

A day in Tanto starts early with cutting the produce of our organic kitchen garden on the beach in Srima. When the buckets are full of basil, arugula, tomatoes in season, pumpkins, lemons Daniel goes to the next village to buy fish. He chooses the fishes one by one. It is 9 o’clock when he arrives to the restaurant. Viji is already cutting vegetables coming from Food link (Auroville distributor of local vegetables) and we supplement the supply with Revathi ordering vegetables from the market cultivated in Ooty and Kodaikanal.

Viji and Vijaya the pizza experts light the fires in the two ovens of Tanto (Auroville and ECR). All the vegetables are cooked in the oven itself while Deepak and Danalakshmi prepare lasagne and sauces and Kalvi does ravioli. We do not use maida but organic spelt. In the meantime, Punjolai prepares our famous ice tea and panna cotta.

Sometimes we serve up to 700 guests in one day. On such days you can wait more than half an hour to be served.

There is a lot of love in Tanto. Enjoy and sometimes be patient.

Our host is God.

Tanto in Italian means ‘abundance’

One home in Tuscany in the fifties. One child watches his mother and his grandmother preparing Sunday lunch. Many ingredients come from the garden or from the local market. No cans to open but everything is prepared choosing the ingredients with care. Traditional Italian cooking is meant to enhance the flavour of each component of a recipe. A little garlic, olive oil, tomatoes, basil, and parsley, salt and pepper. What makes the difference is not how you cook but how you selected the ingredients. At Tanto we are trying to give you an original Italian Sunday lunch every day.