Durbar Square Dining – Patan

The Durbar Squares of the Kathmandu Valley – Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur – are so captivating one could forgive the tourists for sighing obliviously into the tepid nescafes, burnt fries, and gristly momos that are the staple of many a restaurant favourably positioned to scoop up easy business. They won’t even notice the overpriced fare, spurred into a sense of obligation towards the local economy by the tickets they’ve already bought at the entries to these World Heritage Sites.

For those living in the immediate vicinity of these tourist traps, sustenance is rather more problematic. Actually, most locals will never lose sleep over the issue, sustained as they are by the home cooking of their mothers, wives and sisters. And they can eat and drink on the cheap in any number of hariyo parda establishments. In Patan, the trail from Honacha to Chyasal is littered with a decadence of smaller, dingier bhattis and they all seem to enjoy custom. The kids who frequent the tourist traps do so in much the same spirit as we did Thamel in the 1990s; tourist restaurants have a somewhat glamorous sheen to them that your local Friendship Cafe simply cannot manage.

But are they all tourist traps? Clearly there are many permutations at play here. The expensive, crap restaurant; the expensive, good restaurant; the cheap, crap restaurant; and the cheap, good restaurant are only the most obvious categories. The one thing Durbar Square Diners have in common, from a tourist’s perspective, is their proximity to the Durbar Square. Ideally, you’re looking onto it as you feed yourself.

So if you fancy something a little more upmarket than Honacha, even if it is one of the few cross-class bhattis in the Kathmandu Valley, along with Kirtipur’s superior Newa Lahana…where to go, where not? I’ll begin with a couple here and update this post as often as an empty fridge bumps me out my Mangal Bazaar flat onto the streets below. No one pays me to choke myself with momos and chowmein across town.

Cafe de Patan is on the right, right before you get to Patan Durbar Square on the left. I was once or twice positively impressed by both price and rice (in a manner of speaking, of course: the rice here is more likely to be beaten, though not downcast, ha, ha), the crucial qualifier being that I was yet to discover Honacha. The grub’s fine, but very overpriced.

Further down the road as you pass the square, on the overhanging, first floor of a long building block housing a random assortment of typical Patan businesses, is a busy, cosy establishment the name of which slips my mind (how unprofessional, because amateur, I told you no one pays me for this gig, I’ll go check tomorrow, ok? checked – it’s Layeku Kitchen), but which is unmissable – at first sight you’d take it for part of the square itself, except it is separated from it by tooting motorbikes and the usual accoutrements of third world civilisation. The Nepali set of black lentil soup w/rice, greens, mismas veggies, chicken, tomato chutney and papad was not the most authentic, but it came in nice, weighty brass bowls, came to just Rs 185, and came in very handy considering I was having lunch at 3pm. P(rice)!

To complete the triumvirate south side of Patan Durbar Square we have Tajeju Restaurant & Bar, housed in a skinny, unattractive cement block just as you turn to the right, away from the square, into a busy market street. The chief attractions are the views from the fifth floor and the cheap prices. The food is adventurous (szechuan noodles, for instance) but not particularly evocative of anything.

More to come.