a href="/myfiles/Images/2013/09/17/ki20_big.jpg" title="A view of the special Onam meal "Onassadya" served on banana leaves at a restaurant in Dammam on Monday. — SG photo by Faisal Aboobacker Ponnani" A view of the special Onam meal "Onassadya" served on banana leaves at a restaurant in Dammam on Monday. — SG photo by Faisal Aboobacker Ponnani Faisal Aboobacker Ponnani Saudi Gazette AL-KHOBAR — Kerala expatriates across the Kingdom celebrated their national harvest festival “Onam” on Monday. As part of their celebration, hotels and restaurants around the Kingdom run by Keralites prepare a grand meal called “Onasaddya”. A huge rush was reported during lunch time in Dammam, Riyadh and Jeddah Keralite hotels to have the special feast. As part of Onam, the Indian Embassy and India international schools all over the Kingdom also observed a holiday. Around a million Keralite expatriates celebrated Onam by wearing new traditional dresses and relishing the tasty “Onasaddya” which is a strictly vegetarian meal consisting of 20 to 30 essential dishes served on banana leaves along with different varieties of vegetables, rice, banana and a sweet drink called “payasam”. The lip smacking meal consists of the best of Kerala cuisines. “I enjoyed eating Onasaddya in a Dammam restaurant. It was like eating in my home town,” said Ramachandran, a technician from the southern Indian state of Kerala. He did not go to his work on Monday to celebrate Onam with his friends wearing new traditional dresses. “Being a Keralite I have to celebrate our national harvest festival wherever I am living,” said Balakrishna Pillai, a design engineer. “My wife had made 20 different vegetable dishes and two types of payasam and we invited our bachelor friends to have the grand meal “Onasaddya” and to enjoy our festival.” “I have spent SR25 to eat 'Onasaddya' at a hotel in Al-Khobar. The price is higher than last year,” said Abdul Qader, an office assistant. Hotel owners should not increase the price of festival food even if the cost of vegetables and other commodities have increased, he said. Hotel owners said the increase in the festival food prices this year was because Indian vegetables in the Kingdom have become costly, with prices jumping from SR8 to SR12 per kg. Moreover, they said that importing banana leaves to the Kingdom was very difficult and risky due to damage and shipment delays.
