The most unique tasting menus to try on your next trip to Ladakh
A slew of young chefs from the region are turning to small plates featuring fun spins on local favourites — from buckwheat ‘chilla’ crackers to ‘khambir’ bread baskets — to spotlight the diversity of their cuisine
On a quiet hill in Leh surrounded by willow trees and arid mountains lies chef Jigmet Mingyur’s 10-seater restaurant Tsam Khang. The format is that of a tasting menu, which features dishes such as stinging nettle soups, foraged salads and stews. The nine-course meal includes dishes eaten in a Ladakhi home albeit in small portions. Mingyur, who gave up his monkhood to follow his passion for food, previously worked at Prana, a restaurant in Goa where he picked up the art of creating small plates, later applying it to food from his home.
Ladakh’s food is far more complex than momos and thukpa. New-age chefs from the region now want to break away from the stereotypes and bring forth their homeland’s culinary bounty and biodiversity through carefully crafted tasting menus. “Serving big portions to guests is a mark of respect for us, but I wanted to showcase the diversity of our food through a multi-course menu," says Mingyur, who initially set up Heritage Kitchen in Nubra Valley, where he designed a six-course menu serving buckwheat crackers and Yarkhandi pulao.
For Kunzes Angmo, the inspiration to host curated meals came while writing a research paper on Ladakhi food. “I was not exclusively cooking my food. But then I realised that the representation of our food is bastardised, and there is a lot of confusion with Tibetan food. Everyone’s selling momos and making money, but our parents never grew up eating them," says Angmo, who now hosts three-hour long story-driven menus under the brand name Artisanal Alchemy since 2019 at The Jade House, a boutique homestay and Stok Palace Heritage Hotel.
Each Ladakhi dish is a hearty meal in itself, and so it is interesting how the chefs are reimagining them to suit the tasting menu format. “We have turned buckwheat pancakes or chilla that we usually eat in the morning into a cracker for our starter course," says chef Tsetan Namgail, who is part of the all-women kitchen team at Heritage Kitchen. The thin cracker is topped with tangthur, a dish made of local wild greens called saganik that has been mixed with yoghurt, and tempered with a wild chives-infused butter. It’s a perfect small plate to begin the meal.
At Tsam Khang, ingredients like wild capers, seabuckthorn, wild fruits, ephedrine berries and fresh apricots are turned into a salad with a yoghurt dressing. While Angmo has turned Ladakh’s own sourdough bread khambir, and tsong thaltak, a biscuit-bread with onions and poppy seeds into a bread basket. “Food is the easiest way to experience someone’s culture," says Angmo, and these tasting menus are proving to be the best way to understand the culinary diversity of Ladakh.
Both Angmo and Mingyur emphasise how thukpa, the most popular noodle soup from the region, is not just one dish but an entire family of dishes. She serves a version of it called Lama pakthuk that literally translates to monk’s thukpa. Made with dried cheese, dried black peas, radish and dried wild buckwheat leaves, it is seasoned with Chinese celery, freshly ground pepper and cilantro. The dish is prepared in monasteries or when the monks visit households for rituals. The menu at Tsam Khang includes zathuk, another version of thukpa made with stinging nettle and dried cheese. “Thukpa is like dal, there’s no one single recipe," says Angmo, who is constantly working on her thukpa menu to add new varieties and flavours.
The main courses also include dishes that travelled to Ladakh through the trade route as well as those rooted in the local culture. Heritage Kitchen serves a Yarkhandi pulao, a rice and mutton-based dish that is a Central Asian influence. It is cooked in ghee and garnished with caramelised onions. There is also chutagi that holds a place of pride in the menus. This hearty one-pot meal of bowtie pasta is cooked with goat-trotters in its broth. The dish is usually eaten across Ladakh and is considered a celebratory meal.
Ladakh, like most other Himalayan/trans-Himalayan regions, does not have a tradition of dessert. So how is the tasting menu rounded off? At Tsam Khang, Mingyur serves phey-marr, a rustic farmer snack of roasted barley flour, butter, sugar, buttermilk and cheese as dessert. He also brews his own chhaang, the local drink made with fermented barley. The region is known for apricots that make their way into desserts too. At Heritage Kitchen, phey-marr is served with apricot jam, and salty butter tea or kahwa.
Ladakh’s burgeoning culinary scene offers a rare glimpse of the region’s produce and cooking styles that have been shaped by weather, trade and migration. These new-age chefs are bringing fun and flavour through thoughtful plates.
Shirin Mehrotra is a Delhi-based food writer and researcher.
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