Keralan Food (and Community) Is a Calling For Toddy Shop’s Mischa Tropp

“In your twenties you try and figure out who you are and create a bit of an identity,” Mischa Tropp tells Broadsheet. “You go through these periods where you feel a bit lost about what you want do and who you are.”

For the Melbourne chef, the answers were in connection to his cultural heritage. Tropp grew up in Australia, eating few traditional dishes cooked by his Keralan mum along with “hippie” Indian meals he would help his dad make in community kitchens. “I thought I knew about Indian food but as soon as I started researching, I realised I really didn’t know much,” he says.

The road to understanding the home-style Keralan cuisine he’s now known for began on trips to India, where Tropp ate at roadside stalls and learnt authentic recipes from families. His second visit to Wayanad – a north-east district in Kerala – at the age of 25 was pivotal in laying the foundation for everything to come, he notes. Staying with an Indian family, he’d “get up and cook breakfast, cook snacks, cook lunch, snacks again, cook dinner, and over eight days [he’d] learnt 43 dishes.” Nine years on, and the chef still finds himself referencing many of the notes he scribbled down at the time.

What followed was a series of wildly in-demand pop-ups – named We Are Kerala – before a stretch plating modern Keralan dishes at Fitzroy’s The Rochester Hotel in 2018. “Looking back at them, some things were really good, and some were not good enough but when you’re a young chef, that’s just the nature of pop-ups,” Tropp says. “It’s a way of learning and educating yourself by feeding a customer base that’s not necessarily as judgmental as when you own a restaurant.”

When we speak, Tropp sits across from me on one of the 20 seats at his first (and recently opened) diner Toddy Shop. Named after shacks in Kerala selling the titular drink (a milky-white brew from the fermented sap of toddy palms), the Smith Street spot is fun and casual, serving home-style Keralan fare on simple silver plates. “I wanted the identity to feel exactly like India,” he says, pointing out the venue’s dusty pink and sage walls, black-and-white family photographs, miscellaneous groceries on display and other small trinkets.

Building a community, especially for traditional Indian families has been most rewarding, Tropp says. Looking back at his younger years, you could say it’s the kind of purpose he was searching for. “We had a family of five who drove 50 minutes [to get here] and waited 80 minutes with three kids … to have those people enjoy the space is really satisfying.”

Food, community and connection have always been something of a Venn diagram of Tropp’s interests. As a child, cooking meant hanging out with his dad. In his twenties, the chef worked as a kitchen manager at a homeless charity in London. Now, Tropp is hosting the floor and chatting with customers over the occasional free glass of toddy – unlike his first few weeks of service, which saw the chef manage 750 covers solo before realising more hands were needed on deck.

Since gaining clout through his pop-up days, Tropp has come a long way – as has the food he’s serving. “I think the difference between then and now is that I’ve got a bigger profile and Indian food has continually progressed over the last six years in terms of people not just seeking out butter chicken,” he says.

But the chef is just getting started. Opening a fine Indian diner similar to the likes of London’s two-Michelin-starred Gymkhana has been a long-standing ambition. “It’s really cool to look at how Indian food has progressed outside of Australia … there’s still a lot that can be done [here]” – and Tropp has an idea or two.

This article first appeared in Domain Review, in partnership with Broadsheet.