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: North East
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
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
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
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
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