Nepali Cuisine

It's a little difficult to give an accurate picture of Nepali cuisine, as for half our time there we were restricted to the same menu for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

During our time in the mountains, we decided to have a veggie diet, as we were a bit concerned about getting ill. Everyday we had daal bhat for at least one meal, with a selection of pasta, pizza, noodles, potato rosti and spring rolls (which were essentially pasties!) as our other options.

Unsurprisingly, the food was very carb intensive given the nature of the hiking we were doing each day, and our guide Ram made sure we were sufficiently stocked up!

I mentioned daal bhat in my trekking post, but it was the staple of our diet here and something Ram ate twice a day. While the premise was the same everywhere (rice, curry, lentils, greens), the extras varied at each place. Here’s a selection of some of the ones we had.

The other classic Nepali dish we had were momos. These are either fried or steamed dumplings, typically filled with chicken or buffalo. We had some very tasty ones at a restaurant called Sherpa Kitchen in Pokhara.

After three months in South East Asia, it was nice to experience some Indian style spices and curry sauces for a bit of variety. The only problem we found is that food tends to take about an hour to prepare, which is fine if you know this, but can get a bit frustrating if you’re just sitting around waiting. We quickly learnt our lesson and made sure to order early for the rest of our trip.

I couldn’t write this post without mentioning the fact that we had our first deep fried chocolate bar up the mountain! Unfortunately they’d run out of Mars bars so we had to have Snickers, and instead of being battered, it was essentially a snickers pasty, but it was pretty tasty!

We also had a pretty good apple pie and custard, which was very much welcomed given the freezing temperatures!

Overall the food was pretty good here, particularly seeing as most of it had been carted by hand up 3,000m! It would have been interesting to spend more time in Kathmandu to get more of a taste of traditional Nepali cuisine. Next time!