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
Tag Archives: Nepali Cuisine
Nimtho (Delhi, January 2020)
Sikkim, which became an Indian state in 1975, is counted as one of the eight northeastern states of the country. It is not, however, contiguous with the other seven northeastern states, being separated geographically from them by parts of northern West Bengal that lie further east than Sikkim. The population is of largely Nepali origin with the Lepchas and Bhutias among the other major indigenous ethnic groups (there are also Bengali and Marwari communities). My family lived in northern West Bengal in the early 1980s and I went to boarding school in Darjeeling in the mid-1980s. We went on many hiking trips to Sikkim and I had Sikkimese friends in school. Sikkimese food is, therefore, not largely a blank space in my culinary map as is the case with most of the other northeastern states (the other exception is Assam). Unlike Manipur—whose food I know only from our recent meal at Eat Pham—or Nagaland—whose food I know only from meals at Dzükou and Hornbill—I’ve eaten a fair bit of Sikkimese food in my adolescence, though not a whole lot of it since then. As on this trip to Delhi we were trying to eat a greater regional variety of food than we usually end up doing, I was pleased to learn that there is a well-regarded Sikkimese restaurant in Greater Kailash-1: Nimtho. We ate lunch there in between our dinners at Eat Pham and Hornbill. Herewith some details. Continue reading