Fire in the mountains

In cold, cold Ladakh, a revolution is brewing. Restaurants are determined to go past touristy dumplings and stew, to serve authentic homestyle fare. Get set for interactive lunches, hand-rolled noodles, local sourdough and a taste of community. Julley!

- By Reem Khokhar

For most travellers, #LadakhVibes largely means saluting the stereotypes: Dramatic mountainscapes, bucket-lists with the motorcycle, finally making it to Pangong lake after watching 3 Idiots in 2009. This includes food too – thukpa, momos, yak cheese. After all, even local restaurants rarely venture past the trifecta.

But a shift is underway. Over the past decade, Ladakhi chefs have begun celebrating their varied and storied cuisine. They're fighting misconception: Those local meat dumplings are not advertised as momos, they're mokmoks. Local pastas and khambir (a sourdough flatbread) are being championed over generic European claptrap. Time-consuming old recipes are the star attraction at pop-ups. No one expects the cuisine to go national. But each new experiment is its own little revolution. And a reinvention of #LadakhVibes. Take a look.

Trotting down the Silk Road

Padma Yangchan and Jigmet Disket set up Namza Dining in Leh in 2017, hoping that visitors to the chilly capital would want to sample more than the landscape. Much of their menu consists of homestyle preparations that fell out of favour because they were so time and labour intensive, and food even Ladakhis didn't eat often because they were expensive to make. Now, locals and tourists drop in for the gyuma (indulgent handmade mutton sausages typically eaten at feasts) and the morel dumplings. They relish kabra, wild caper shoots foraged in April and May. "It's very bitter, so it is traditionally boiled for some time, or left under running spring water for a few days to wash away the bitterness," says Disket.