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
Tag Archives: Naga Cuisine
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
Dzükou, Eight Years Later (Delhi, December 2024)
My very first Naga meal in Delhi was eaten at Dzükou. That was in January 2016. At the time Dzükou was located in the Hauz Khas market. We loved that meal and resolved to return on our next visit to the city. On our next trip to Delhi, however, we were disappointed to learn that the restaurant had closed. Still later, I got word that they had reopened, not in Hauz Khas but in Vasant Kunj. We had hoped to get there in January 2023 but couldn’t make it work; and in March this year I just forgot about it. I’m happy to report, therefore, that I did make it there on my brief solo trip to Delhi this month and that I enjoyed this meal almost as much as I had the first—the gap arising not from some lower quality at this meal but from the fact that I’ve eaten more Naga and other North Eastern food in the intervening period and as such there was less of the excitement of the new. 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
Dzükou (Delhi, January 2016)
As I noted in one of my write-ups of meals from our last trip to Delhi a couple of years ago, perhaps the major shift in the food scene in Delhi over the last decade and more is the proliferation of restaurants serving a larger range of regional Indian cuisines. It’s a different world now than when I was at university in the late 1980s and then working in advertising in the early 1990s. Then the options were largely south Indian vegetarian and, starting in the early 1990s, a few places offering food from Kerala. (I am not, of course, counting Indian Chinese here as that stopped being a regional Indian cuisine a long time ago—it’s now a pan-Indian thing much like “Mughlai” food.) Now, there’s a lot available: a lot of Malayali restaurants, Parsi/Irani restaurants, Goan restaurants, Rajasthani restaurants, Bengali restaurants, even Bihari and Oriya restaurants. The most pleasing development though in many ways may be the growing number of restaurants serving food from the states of the North East. Continue reading