I ate at Mizo Diner for the first time in March 2024 and I had it on my list of my favourite meals of the year. I’d hoped to get back there during my solo trip to Delhi last December but it didn’t end up happening. And it didn’t happen on my solo trip this March either. But in July I finally made it back again. I don’t think it will end up on my list of best meals of 2025—there’s a bit too much competition in the casual/affordable category from our Japan trip—but it was a very good meal again. Back in 2024 the missus and I had met an old friend there. This time we took the boys along with us, being more confident a year and a half later that their palates had expanded enough for them to enjoy what for them are the more unfamiliar flavours of North East Indian food. It was a good bet: they loved it too. Herewith the details. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Humayunpur
NCC (Delhi, March 2025)
Here, in an effort to get done with my reports on meals eaten out in Delhi in March, is a quick look at another meal I ate on this trip in Humayunpur. If you’ve been following my Delhi reports over the years—or if you know Delhi well—you know that Humayunpur, a village incorporated into South Delhi, is one of the major hubs of North Eastern Indian life in Delhi. It is home to a large number of people from the North Eastern states and it also contains stores that serve them, and an ever-growing number of restaurants that serve their foods. It has become my very favourite part of Delhi to eat in. When I lived in India, I knew very little of the foods of North Eastern India beyond Assam, and now I feel like I am making up for lost time. I ate lunch by myself in Humayunpur in the first week of this trip. That was an excellent Naga lunch at a tiny restaurant named Shilloi. The next week, just a couple of days before my return to Minnesota, I was back to eat another Naga lunch, this time with a friend at NCC. Continue reading
Shilloi (Delhi, March 2025)
In my most recent report on meals at Matamaal—the Kashmiri restaurant in Gurgaon—I noted that eating there has become a ritual on my/our recent trips to Delhi. So too has eating in Humayunpur Market, one of the major centers of North East Indian life in Delhi, especially of North Indian cuisine. The market is dotted with restaurants, small and large, that serve the cuisines of most of the states east of Bangladesh (I’ve not yet come across any references to restaurants serving the food of Tripura), along with Tibetan, Nepali, Korean and various East Asian cuisines. On my visit to Delhi in December I ate a Nepali lunch at Bhansaghar and an Arunachali lunch at Arunachali Sajolang. Both were excellent. Away from Humayunpur, I also ate an excellent Naga lunch at Dzükou in Vasant Kunj. I was hellbent on eating Naga food again on this trip and this time I fulfilled that desire in Humayunpur, at a small restaurant named Shilloi. Continue reading
Bhansaghar (Delhi, December 2024)
Let’s keep the restaurant reports from my recent trip to Delhi rolling. As I noted in the first report I posted—on a very good lunch at Arunachali Sajolang—I am not posting these in the order in which they were eaten. Indeed, today’s report is on a lunch eaten two days prior to the Arunachali Sajolang meal. On this occasion, I was on my own; I was, however, in the same neighbourhood, in Humayunpur. If you’ve followed my Humayunpur reports over the last few years, or if you know Delhi well, you know that this neighbourhood—an incorporated village in Safdarjung Enclave in South Delhi—is one of the centers of North Eastern life and food in Delhi. The market is dotted with restaurants that serve the foods of the North East as well as other businesses that cater to residents who hail from those states. Bhansaghar is technically not one of those restaurants as it is principally a Nepali and Tibetan restaurant. But North Eastern solidarity in Delhi extends to people from Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet as well (to say nothing of Sikkim) and so it is not surprising that they are located in Humayunpur. They were recommended to me by the food writer, Shirin Mehrotra and I am very thankful as I had a very nice lunch. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Arunachali Sajolang (Delhi, December 2024)
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. Continue reading
Mizo Diner (Delhi, March 2024)
My Bombay food reports are done—see here for last week’s street/casual food round-up—but I still have quite a few to go from the subsequent five weeks we spent in Seoul. From Seoul we then went to Delhi for 12 days before returning to Minnesota this Wednesday. We didn’t eat out so very much in Delhi but I’m going to intersperse reports of those meals among the Seoul ones. First up, is a report on a lunch we ate at Mizo Diner in Humayunpur. In the unlikely event that you’ve been tracking my Delhi reports over the years, you’ll know that the North Eastern restaurant hub in Humayunpur in South Delhi has become one of my absolute favourite places to eat at in Delhi. Indeed, I don’t think there’s anywhere else in the city with such concentrated quality, regardless of cuisine. Our lunch at Mizo Diner only confirmed this view. I would go so far as to say that it might be the best of the meals we’ve eaten in Humayunpur, which is to say, it was very good indeed. It was also my favourite of our meals out on this Delhi trip, and the other places we ate at included some of our very favourite restaurants in the city. Here are the details. Continue reading
Oh! Assam (Delhi, January 2023)
Okay, let’s get the Delhi restaurant reports started, and unlike with the reports from December’s southern California sojourn, let’s begin at the beginning: with our first meal out, at Oh! Assam in Humayunpur.
No prizes for guessing what kind of cuisine the restaurant serves. Even as the foods of the North Eastern states have become more visible in Delhi, there aren’t that many places to eat Assamese food. Back in 2014, I reported on a lunch at Jakoi, the restaurant in the Assam Bhavan in Chanakyapuri. That meal, I said, was more interesting than good. I was therefore curious to see what things would be like at an Assamese restaurant in Humayunpur, which is now the major centre of North Eastern food (and life) in Delhi. And so we arrived at the restaurant on our first full day in the city, determined to go out into the weak January sunlight in an attempt to synchronize our body clocks with the local time. Herewith, the details. Continue reading
Hornbill (Delhi, January 2020)
Back to Humayunpur, back to another restaurant featuring the food of a North Eastern state. On Sunday I reviewed a dinner at the Manipuri restaurant, Eat Pham—a dinner we really enjoyed. A few days later we went back to the same market and embarked on a very similar hunt for another restaurant, Hornbill, which serves food from Nagaland. While our Eat Pham outing was our first encounter with Manipuri food, Hornbill was our second Naga meal in Delhi in as many trips as a family. We were last here all together in January 2016 (I’ve come on my own in between a few times) and on that trip one of our favourite meals was at Dzükou in Hauz Khas. Dzükou has since closed in that location. I’ve heard tell it has reopened in Vasant Kunj, but we didn’t need to go quite that far from Noida when there are a number of Naga places in Humayunpur and environs, and Hornbill particularly well-reviewed among them. We descended on them with the same friends we’d eaten at Dzükou with four years ago. Here is what we found after we found the restaurant. Continue reading
The Categorical Eat Pham (Delhi, January 2020)
We’re coming to the end of our stay in Delhi on this trip (we’ve been here for almost two weeks). Coming “home” to Delhi has become progressively alienating in the 26+ years since I left for graduate school in the US. For the first few years it was like falling back easily into a mother tongue you don’t speak in your day-to-day life. After that as the Indian economy liberalized and the mediascape and urban landscape began to transform radically, trips “home” began to feel increasingly foreign: familiar roads and places became harder to map, my old points of reference were no longer reliable. And, of course, as my life in the US—work, marriage, children—became more established the question of which was “home” became more blurred. This is, of course, a familiar immigrant story. Though there is a great deal of class privilege encoded in the fact that I have been able to be a regular visitor to India (for weeks at a time) ever since I left, I don’t want to claim that there’s anything exceptional about this sort of thing. But for me this trip has been different. Continue reading