A Taste of Nepal

By Melanie Chambers

Discovering Nepal’s traditional cuisine.

“Coconut is the most traditional kind, but many like caramel now,” says my food guide. Either flavour, the rice flour exterior of the Yomari looks more like an alien baby than a gooey sweet dumpling. Yomari is typically eaten during Yomari Punhi when the Newari community celebrates the end of the rice harvest.

Nepal only opened its doors to mass tourism in the 1950s after a political revolution. And while the influence of foreigners has meant you can now get a pizza and cappuccino, for the most part, Nepalese food has remained traditional, and often, ceremonial with many dishes borrowed from neighbouring China, Tibet and India.

TRADITIONAL NEPALI MEAL

As I make my way to Kathmandu, a city full of restaurants and street food, I am also excited for the opportunity to eat in people’s homes to get a sense of what local Nepalese eat everyday. I discover that it’s a type of cuisine so authentic and regional, I haven’t even heard of most of it.

In the touristy neighbourhood of Thamel, my food tour guide and I duck through tunnels and emerge into a secret courtyard. After squeezing up a set of stairs, we sit on boxes in a room full of pots and pans; in the corner, an elderly woman holds a basket of yomari over an open flame, while a younger woman pours batter from a plastic bucket onto a hot griddle. Bara are Newari black lentil pancakes eaten with fatty fried beef. It feels like I’m a member of a secret food society. If my guide leaves me, I might never find my way out.

DURBAR SQUARE IN KATHMANDU

Next, we make our way to the epicentre of the city: Durbar Square dates to the third century when two neighbouring trading villages merged. Full of water fountains, Hindu god statues, Buddhist temples and the living goddess (a Hindi girl chosen as the living embodiment of the mother goddess), it’s also the site of centuries worth of kingly coronations. Bamboo beams and makeshift scaffolding surround many structures – a reminder that an earthquake devastated much of this area in 2015. But, it’s energetic, bustling, and full of the city’s best street food.

MAKING SEL ROTI

One of the strangest treats, dahipuri is a round hard shell – deep-fried unleavened bread – filled with chick peas and potatoes, then topped with yoghurt and tamarind chutney. Crunchy, gooey, sweet, with a kick of chili heat, it’s a circus of textures and flavours. It reminds me of the city itself.

The next day, we walk through Thamel before entering one of the first neighbourhood restaurants built in 1979. A bowl of steaming noodle soup arrives: thukpa, a generic term for soup and stew in Tibet, overflowed with vegetables and chunks of pork with the skin still on. Paired with an Everest beer, it’s a hearty meal.

FRUIT AND VEGETABLE SELLER IN KATHMANDU

Eventually, after a two-hour drive southeast of Kathmandu, past half-finished concrete structures with exposed steel rebar and tentacles of electrical cables, the landscape changes to green fields. We stop for a meal near a monastery where Buddha is said to have sacrificed his life for a dying tigress and her cubs. My first dish is a plate of momos, Tibetan dumplings. Often filled with meat, these pockets of freshness have spinach and cheese with a side of chilis.

After lunch, my guide and I stop in farmers’ fields to say hello and drink fresh milk straight from the cow. We arrive in Panauti, one of the oldest traditional Newari towns in Nepal, for dal bhaat, the unofficial dish of Nepal originally from India. “Eat with your hands,” says my guide. Spreading the cooked lentils into the rice and chutneys, then licking my fingers, feels naughty. The best part is when the waitress returns to ladle out more.

NEPALI WOMAN WORKING IN THE FIELDS

For a week, I stay in farm homes, and eat variations of Sherpa stew – giant chunks of vegetables with dumplings or pieces of homemade pasta, in a thick yellow chicken broth. Simmering for hours on top of a wooden fireplace in the corner of the kitchen, the stew is the perfect Nepalese comfort food.