“My restaurant first opened in Patan 125 years ago. My grandfather started it all,” proclaims Ramesh Joshi.
Joshi owns Honacha, an unassuming but legendary eatery in the heart of Patan. He is Newar, a distinct linguistic and cultural group that lives in the Kathmandu Valley, Sikkim, and Gorkhaland.
The Newar speak their language and follow their brands of Hinduism and Buddhism. They dominated central Nepal for centuries, until 1768, when the the Gorkha conquered the Kathmandu Valley.
Today, almost 1.5 million Newars live in Nepal and make up 4.6% of the country’s population. They are celebrated for contributions to the valley’s rich architecture, art, literature, agriculture, and their distinctive cuisine. While the city of Bhaktapur is the Newar cultural center, most Newar restaurants are in Patan, (like Bhaktapur, a UNESCO world heritage site).
Joshi serves lunch and dinner to both locals and tourists. The first thing diners encounter upon stepping into Honacha is a broad worktop, laden with a great number of freshly cooked dishes, overseen by Joshi’s wife, Saraswati. A large bowl of flattened rice—chiuara in Nepali or baji in Newar—along with dal and fried potatoes and an assortment of vegetables, is ready to be served.
Buffalo meat sizzles away on a hotplate, managed by a young employee. In fact, buffalo meat and a variety of herbs and spices, including chili, cumin, coriander, and fenugreek, are used far more copiously by Newar than by other Nepali minorities.
Joshi proudly serves the most popular dishes first. No Newar meal would be complete without haku choila—buffalo meat that is roasted until black, then marinated in spices and served cold. For the less courageous, there are mutton, chicken, duck, and mushroom variations. The dish is usually eaten with baji, which softens the assault of the spices. Senla looks quite similar but it’s liver, marinaded in salt, cumin, garlic and ginger, then steamed and sautéed.
Chatamari is somewhat more conventional. Also known as Newari pizza, this is a savory rice flour pancake that is topped with egg, beans, corn, mushrooms, onions and keema, a ground meat.
Bara is another popular type of pancake, made from split black lentils, but unlike chatamari, it does not come with toppings, though it is often served with egg, meat or vegetables. Joshi serves bara straight out of the pan and piping hot when they are crispy on the outside and soft on the inside.
Tomato achar, a tasty dipping sauce made from tomatoes, lemon or limes, tamarind, fresh green chilis, dried red chili, garlic, ginger, sesame seeds or soya bean seeds, along with cumin seeds, cumin powder, turmeric, salt, pepper and cilantro make for a popular accompaniment that’s also served with momos.
Newar food is seasonal, depending on what ingredients are available and what weather and tradition dictate. My courage is duly tested by Saraswati Joshi who proudly presents me a couple of winter dishes that take time to cook, takha and nyakhuna. These too involve buffalo meat, boiled in spices and then left overnight to turn into a jelly. While takha is made from buffalo stock, nyakhuna is made with dried fish. I get to taste the ‘palu’ version of takha which is red in color and particularly spicy.
Joshi also serves up some more eclectic Newar dishes, which he says are very popular with locals— tisya is buffalo spinal cord, nhepu is buffalo brain, khago is buffalo stomach, jibro is buffalo tongue and syapu mhicha is buffalo bone marrow. Kachila, fermented raw buffalo meat, is another local favorite. Nothing, it seems, goes to waste in a Newar kitchen.
Several tasty potato dishes usually accompany the buffalo bonanza—sadheku alu is a marinated potato dish while jhol alu is potato in thick gravy. Alu tama, a potato curry with bamboo shoots, is the most popular.
Put altogether on one plate, much like an Indian thali, samay baji is often served at the start of festivals and contains baji (flattened rice) and samay (puffed rice), black soy beans, ginger, bara, chatamari, choila and egg.
Among the desserts, yomari stands out, not only for its subtle sweet taste but also because it looks rather like a 19th-century wooden spinning top.
“I have changed very little since my grandfather’s time,” says Joshi. “The recipes are the same. I stick to the old traditions.”
Guna Raj Luitel, Editor-in-chief of Nagarik Daily, a prominent Nepali newspaper, suggests that non-Newar like himself will go out to eat Newar food the same way a German or British person might enjoy an Italian meal.
“Wherever there are Newar communities outside of Kathmandu, in places like Pokhara, their food is available,” he says. “But in areas like the Terai, on the border to India, you won’t be able to get these kinds of dishes. People in other communities don’t know how to cook this food.”
All Newar delicacies are washed down with Thon, Chhyang in Nepali, a fermented drink made from barley, rice or millet, like beer, though milky in color, with 5 to 12% alcohol. Aila, or rakshi in Nepali, is a stronger proposition made by distilling fermented rice, millet or fruit and can have an alcohol content of up to 45%. Both are essential accompaniments at Newar festivals.
“The Newar celebrate more festivals than other Nepali communities,” Joshi suggests. “And that’s why the old recipes are preserved and why our food has remained so popular. One day, my son will continue the tradition.”