Where to Eat in Belur: 5 Restaurants, Ranked

The dining room attached to Sumukha Residency on Lakshmi Devi Temple Road, 629 m from the temple gate and opposite the government hospital. It is a vegetarian multi-cuisine room — south Indian breakfast, north Indian thalis at midday — and it takes the overflow from the residency's function hall, so it can be busy on wedding dates. The residency itself is on Hassan district's official hotel list at 08177 222181; the restaurant's own website is no longer live, so hours are unverified.

A vegetarian eating house 214 m from the temple gate, on the shop street between the compound and the bus stand. "Udipi hotel" is Karnataka's own shorthand for a plain-fronted vegetarian place serving idli, dosa, and a rice plate at midday, and this is one of the handful within a three-minute walk of the temple. We could not find a published menu or hours from the business itself, so check on the door before you count on it for lunch.

A non-vegetarian eating house on the Hassan road, 2.4 km from the temple gate and the furthest of the three in that cluster. Worth knowing about precisely because it is not vegetarian: nearly everything within walking distance of the Chennakeshava compound is, and biryani in Belur means coming out this way. Hours unverified — we found no source belonging to the business.

A vegetarian restaurant out on the Hassan road about 1.7 km north-east of the temple, in the small cluster of eating houses near the bypass junction where the buses and the lorries stop. Too far to walk from the compound in the middle of the day — 2.3 km on the footway, nearly half an hour — but a straightforward halt if you are driving in or out. No published hours we could verify.

A small eating house in the same roadside cluster as Udupi Grand and Hotel Hamza on the Hassan road, about 1.7 km from the temple. These three are what is open early and late when the shop street by the temple gate has shut; none of them has a page of its own, so everything past the position and the kind of place it is would be guesswork, and we have not guessed.