Okay, let’s get the Delhi reports underway. I was/am in Delhi by myself for this short trip (when this posts, I will be 12 hours from departure) and so the eating out situation was very different from when the missus and the boys are here with me. Thankfully, in India it is very easy for a single diner to eat a well-rounded meal and that’s because our ancestors were wise enough to invent the OG tasting menu: the thali. Almost all my meals out involved thalis. Indeed, even a couple of the meals I ate with other people involved thalis. This lunch, eaten at an Arunachali restaurant in Humayunpur, was one such. I was joined by an old friend who was coincidentally in town from Bombay to speak at a queer lit fest. It was the first Arunachali meal for both of us. Here’s how it went.

We weren’t supposed to be eating this meal though. We’d met in Humayunpur in order to eat Mizo food. Back in March, one of our favourite meals had been at Mizo Diner and I was hellbent on eating more Mizo food, this time at one of Humayunpur’s original Mizo restaurants, Lushai Beanery. Google said they were still open and furnished an address and so we planned to meet outside it. I got there first but Lushai Beanery was not at the address. And no one at that address or in the vicinity would acknowledge their prior existence which made it difficult to figure out if/where they had moved. By this point my friend arrived and we tried calling the two numbers listed online for the restaurant. Neither worked. So we decided to leave the Lushai Beanery situation a mystery and looked around for some place else to eat.

Naga food is always a great option but I’d eaten a fantastic Naga meal just the previous day (I’m posting these reports out of sequence). Manipuri food at the Categorical Eat Pham is always a good call, as is Assamese food at Oh Assam! But we opted instead for an Arunachali meal at a restaurant right next to (the greatly expanded) Oh Assam!: Arunachali Sajolang. To get to the restaurant you have to enter the building on the ground floor, go to the back, ignore the other restaurant on the ground floor in the back and take the steep blue stairs up to the first floor. There you’ll emerge onto a very attractive, colourful patio. There are some tables and some floor seating there; and there’s also an attractive indoor dining space. We opted to sit outside and quickly got down to business.

The menu is not large but as we know nothing about Arunachali food we asked our server for guidance. This proved to be a bit of a challenge. She was very nice but not really up to the task of describing dishes and ingredients to non-Arunachalis. We decided therefore to just get a thali each. My friend got the Smoked Pork Curry thali and I got the Dried Mithun thali. What is mithun, you are probably wondering. It is the name given to domesticated gaur (also known as Indian bison), the largest bovine in the world. I’m not sure if in Arunachal Pradesh both fresh and dried mithun is eaten but at the restaurant dried mithun is what you get—makes sense given the distance to Delhi.

Other than the meat centerpieces, the thalis were identical when they arrived. We were given a large brass plate each with a mound of rice (topped by a papad) in the center and an array of pickled and fermented chutneys encircling it. Alongside the main thali came a large bowl with our curry of choice, and smaller bowls containing dal, mixed boiled vegetables and a kidney bean dish with fermented bamboo. We asked our server if she could identify all the chutneys/relishes on the thali for us. She gave it a shot but we couldn’t figure them all out. Looking head on at the thali, there was a blistering hot tomato chutney at 1 o’clock. I couldn’t tell you which of the four tomato chutneys listed on the menu it was but I can tell you it was also very good. Also very good were the radish-related business at 3 o’clock and the sharp/bitter greens at 5 o’clock. The very bitter brinjal/eggplant chutney at 7 0’clock took me a few tastes to get into but once I adjusted I liked it a lot. Ditto for the pungent chutney at 9 o’clock which seemed to feature axone (fermented soybeans) and dried fish.

Both curries were excellent. The dried mithun was, of course, very chewy but I enjoyed it very much. If I had to pick between the two curries though, I would go for the smoked pork. The dal was on the tepid-cool side, temperature-wise. I’m not sure if that was how it was supposed to be but decided not to tax our server further. It was quite tasty but it was the accompanying, very simple-looking beans and mixed boiled veg sides that we both may have liked the most. The thalis are unlimited, by the way. But it’s so much food to start that not even I could muster the wherewithal to ask for more of anything.

Oh yes, we both had a mug of fermented rice beer with our thalis. Some flies fell into my friend’s mug after she’d taken a few sips but she declined to have it replaced as it wasn’t completely to her taste. I like fermented rice beer but this was rather a lot of it and I only managed to finish half of mine as well.

For a look at the restaurant, the menu, and what we ate, launch the slideshow below. Scroll down to see how much it all cost and to see what’s coming next.

The total with tip came to Rs. 1600 or so. Or less than $20 for the two of us. That is what is known as a very good deal. They don’t take credit cards, by the way, so if you go, bring cash.

Alright, my next Delhi meal report will involve another thali-based lunch eaten in Humayunpur. I might get that up as soon as Thursday. No later than the weekend at any rate.