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.

follow your nose to…Kirtipur

A lazy Saturday afternoon eased past in Bishalnagar and my hopes of hauling friends laden with wives and chiles upto a bhatti in hilltop Kirtipur in the southwest of the valley began to founder in glass after glass of lager. Chyaang! Chwoela! Chiura! I yelled, to little avail. Naah, mumbled one, look there, it’s pouring in Kirtipur. Whuddyu wanna do there anyways? Have a Beer! Barbecued meat! Bread roll!

I persisted. And the skies parted down Kirtipur way just as a van rolled into the gates, at our service. Hurriedly I gathered the more adventurous amongst us and a quick dash across the city and through the lush expanses of Tribhuvan University brought us out onto a road leading straight towards the ridge-top town of Kirtipur. Not the Kirtipur of my unfounded, obsolete imaginings, but a wall of brick and concrete cubes facing onto all comers.

But this ancient town has retained more than just symbolic continuity with its past. As we swung right up onto the incline leading to Newa Lahana, our destination, older houses were to be seen interleaved amongst the new. We soon came out onto a square, parked, and trundled down through an alley strung across with soft yellow pearls of bulbs and sided with old, well-kept residences on the walls of which could be seen affixed a range of cultural artifacts, much in the manner of (the inside of) an English pub. To be honest, Thambahal reminded me of a medieval European town centre, complete with tourists (us!), albeit a little dustier, rustier and mustier.

This is it! announced our second-timer. We hesitated to climb the wooden stairs leading up to a raised platform next to a big red and black banner reading ‘Newa Lahana’ (in Newari). A few drinkers lounged about on a few pretty cushions and straw sukuls. This is it?

Far from it. In a plain modern building to the left, there were customers and floor space aplenty, and it was buzzing. Nawa Lahana is essentially a rambling, open-air bhatti complete with lovely dusky views of the valley before and behind, but this is not what the youngsters throng this place for. It’s a community-run restaurant, and local women chip in with their specialities – be it tongue or marrow or a drink to singe the tongue and chill the marrow – and they’re special indeed. The baras had a fluffy, bready fullness about them that Honacha can’t match; the sukuti was luscious, almost sweet despite the fire in them; and the marrow is a little more delicate than what I gingerly tried in Lazimpat’s Bhumi Resto-bar. The chyaang, served either in big earthen jars or heavy brass vases, is more than adequate, though as latecomers we had to beg for a fair portion of what was left in the evening crush.

The bill, as always, was ludicrous. Why do I continue to frequent the overpriced, undercooked tourist haunts of the city when I can eat and drink my fill at any one of the exemplars of our proud tradition of bhattis?

Wunjala no Moskva

Wunjala Moskva, the ‘garden restaurant in the heart of the city’, had long been a mystery to me. A Newari-Russian eatery seemed a conceit too easily construed as ‘ey, some boris got hitched to a maiya and opened the kitchen to the paying public’. But the place had languished in relative obscurity far too long for my liking. And if it had been around so long, they had to be doing something right. Right?

Duly booked in for a Russian set menu, this old dog led his folks into the Naxal garden for a New Year’s Eve meal. First impressions, impressive. A raised dais bound on three sides by cabins of faded brick laced with carved wood, topped with elegant tiles and fronted with glass panels to gaze out onto the masked and costumed dancers awaiting us. We settled in, shivering, and it slowly dawned on us the chill was the only Moskva about Wunjala.

The waiter explained to us the Russian grub would be a while. Ok, we said, let’s get started on the drinks. A good quarter of an hour later he stole in apologetically with the booze. ‘It really will take a while. How about some Newari food?’ We were adamant. He relented. But another quarter passed and he was back, a pitiable expression on his face. ‘Er, sir…the kitchen won’t take the order.’

‘Eh? Where’s the manager?’ Another wait, and we were informed the manager was ‘just too busy’.

I think it was at this point my father threatened the poor waiter with my blog. We asked for the bill, shouted at the patently unoccupied manager dawdling at the bar, and stormed off to an excellent and very reasonably priced New Year’s menu of prawn-stuffed avocados, tender lamb chops, spinach crepes with orange syrup, and chocolate mousse at the Radisson. Ruffles were duly smoothed. But I was ashamed at how badly Wunjala had treated us.

Surprise, surprise, they called to apologise the next year. A bit more ranting on my part, and we were invited to come back and sample the Russian menu. For free. So we did. The Russian set – herbed soups, rich stews, heavy salads and some variation on a shish kebab – was tasty enough, though unremarkable. The service, however, was authentically serf-like. We forgave them. Put it down to a labour dispute and general unprofessionalism. But next time – and there will be one – I’ll stick with the Newari.

nagdaha buzz

a limber out of the dustbowl across the river from Dhapakhel led us to Nagdaha, another body of water surrounded by low terraces of green and yellow, another pocket of peace that couldn’t help but remind us of Taudaha-by-Chobhar. Part of the pond sectioned off as a patch of grassy wetland where waddled wild ducks and coots and white storks, and in the early evening joined by swallows swooping to meet their reflections. Facing onto the water we shared a ragged garden with other picnickers – the usual assortment of lads, familiers and couplets at the corners, speaking of what? away from the disapproving darts of self-professed loved ones. We tasted tongues (jibro fry) and guzzled beer, and Bikash lumped out luscious, spicy has ko chwoela picked up in a earthen brick eatery I’d never had picked for anything but demolition, to temper the light daze of the day.

Thence to the bar Bikash runs, Buzz. The novelty stemming as much as from the unlikeliness of the locality of Jawalakhel as from the bar’s cosy neighbourhood feel and warm tones. We balanced on the barstools and made merry, though what the rest made of us drunken knaves is doubtful enough.

A second sober visit confirmed my instincts. A large grave Buddha dominates one wall and is reflected in the opposite mirror; stylised paintings of women’s faces fill the walls around wooden chairs and tables with elegant bamboo coasters. Buzz is up the road to St. Mary’s, opposite the bonus branches of New Orleans, and a little further on, Roadhouse Café. There’s a couple of restaurants about as well, and with Quixote’s Cove set to lay out its literary wares in the next couple of months, I run the grave risk of abandoning Thamel altogether.

Who’s Nhuchhe?

Listing to interminable, reactionary rambles on the quagmire of Nepali politics, I sit shrouded in my own darkness, list in the flickering flames we draw on, amused only by the idea that this Baluwatar space, once most likely the seat of a minor noble in Rana times, also served as the headquarters of the royalist Janashakti Party, before its modern-day incarnation as *Nhuchhe’s Kitchen: The Organic Bistro. Where last year I sip-supped on laligurans juice (a little tar, refreshing, and awfully nationalistic) and organic buff momos from Kavre, presumably reared with much tender care before being dragged off to the slaughtering grounds in the Valley mooing Jai Bajrangabali Mata Ki Jai Please Toot and Have A Nice Day!

(*since incarnated once more as a Thai & Organic restaurant!)

on the bhatti trail

Fresh from the Gokyo trail, alternating between explications of myself (to bemused locals) and my country (to curious phareners), the latter peppered with exhortations to try the tongba! the chhyaang! – imagine my indignation once we’d twistered ourselves around a mini-table on the rooftop of the Anacha bhatti to be told yes, we’d get our sekuwas, our egg baras, our alu ko achar and our kachela, but there was no chhyaang. Eh? What’s that? No chhyaang in a bhatti?

So it was true! That dwarf of a Home Minister was really getting on my nerves now. The dance bars? The footpath people? The casinos? They don’t sell anything I want. But moonshine? Are we to be condemned to drink shite Nepali lager and worse Indo-whisky at the expense of our homegrown and well, well-tested local brews?

Still, the view of the Krishna Mandir flush in front of Anacha is superlative. It’s one thing to be craning about with your camera while motorbikes vroom you away, another to be sitting back admiring the intricate stone figurework washing down some crunchy, spicy sekuwa with a bowl of…?

It was time to move on. Indeed, it was incumbent upon us to get to the bottom of this sorry business. Where was the chhyaang? No less than a bhatti crawl would do. We paid the sahuni, stoutly surrounded by her wares, a pot of money, and a large flat tawa on which she turned half a dozen egg baras over while shouting at her charges.

We crossed Patan Durbar Square in the fading gold of the evening, arrowed for Chasal, where, my pharen-local friend informed me, a classy bhatti awaited, buffalo testicles at the ready. But just as soon as we’d dipped into one of the alleys we espied a hariyo parda. We peeked in – a tiny, grimy cove sucked us in. Steel bowls of chhyaang were quickly doled out under the smiles of the regulars. Thin, but plentiful. Indifferent plates of chewy meat made their way towards us. In a circle around the stove a family conversed in Newari as they ate and drank, the littlest of all cradling her own littlest plate of meat. And what plopped from above? A starling, peering out her mud nest on the blackened rafters.

A few more twists and turns in the dark we burst upon the Chasal bhatti, an altogether grander, dozen-tabled affair housed in a roofed-in courtyard, replete with posters of stupas and tigers reclining before waterfalls. More birds, hens this time, cleaning up under the tables. The chhyaang was altogether richer, the meat yet enticing after all our labours, and the ambience, classic. Here the men of Nepal drink and eat and talk and laugh.

I’d love to tell you how to get here. Only I don’t remember. Try Chasal Chowk next to Patan Durbar Square. This would be my local if I were local to Patan. Where’s yours?