A Taste of a Previous Home

Thakali Khana, up top so it shows up on the preview thumbnail.

Early last fall a former coffee shop near my workplace closed and put up a new sign:

Lumbini Restaurant & Bar / Nepal * Indian Food

When I saw that the sign specifically listed Nepal before Indian food, and had the Nepali flag first on their sign, my heart began to beat faster. 

Close up of their sign

Would this be the first Nepali focused restaurant in our fair city? We have Indian restaurants, including some with Nepali chefs. They have cloth napkins, fancy glass goblets for your water, and lots of art on display and deliberate decor. They offer a nice experience for going on a date, but are too expensive to visit very often. I could not return to any of them with Lumbini taunting me.

I had no choice but to play the waiting game. I put that top photo in my class slides and begged my students to tell me when they opened. Around the second week of November one of my students told me that they were open, so that weekend I went in for a meal.

Lumbini is as close to the Nepali eating experience as I have ever had outside of Nepal. At the end of this post I will add a lengthy description, but there's a photo at the top of this post to make your mouth water.

The first time I ate at Lumbini it didn't just bring back memories, it reminded me of who I used to be. Uncounted meals eaten in smokey, poorly lit rooms, sitting cross-legged on a woven bamboo mat on a dirt floor, eating off of an aluminum plate on the same dirt floor in front of me. Rice and dhal cooked over a wood fired hand-made brick and mud-mortared stove. Meals eaten at bus stops with benches and tables, maybe even electric lights, but still that smoke in the air, the dishes washed at a pump outside.

Food was always served by women, whether in a home or restaurant. They were both pleasantly surprised that I ate correctly (right hand scooping food from plate to mouth, left hand picking up a cup of water; digging in without even asking for one of the two spoons they have for measuring sugar and tea) and mildly offended that I was unable to eat half of my body weight in one sitting. 

In some circles there is no higher compliment than visibly enjoying the food that someone has cooked. This can be amplified by licking the fingers clean before washing and letting loose a proper belch, to show that you speak truly when you say that you are physically incapable of taking another bite. 

Just one more bite!

The second time I needed to confirm that I had not dreamed the entire experience. It was just as good as the first time, and I decided that the next time I had to bring my family with me. They are fairly adventurous, but I was still a bit nervous. For years I had been cooking curry for them, and they called it "Nepal Curry," when it was nothing of the sort. It was MY curry, influenced by my time in Nepal, but also by my cooking experiences in Korea and Kansas. What if the flavors were too weird for them? What if my love for Nepali food was mostly sentimental? 

What if my family rejects this food? Or dismisses it as not worth eating more than once? It would be a rejection of a fundamental formative chunk of my past. 

Like saying, "I love you, but lose the left hand." 

The third time we ordered five different dishes as well as dumplings as an appetizer. I was pretty sure that something in the lineup would work, hoping that the khana would be front and center. It is our default Korean mode to share food from the center of the table, which was a bit awkward with the khana. I mixed some dhal bhat (bean curry with rice) to serve out, but the side dishes were a bit awkward for everyone to reach. Some cultural differences are just difficult to get past.

That's one happy family! Nice photo, Maxine!

Maxine's favorite dish was t'hukpa, a Tibetan style noodle soup. Very comforting food, and evidence that if a culture has chickens they eventually develop chicken noodle soup. Quinten liked the sukatee: dried pork strips fried with spices and onions. The Pulao (rice cooked with veggies and nuts) and Chicken Chili (sweet and spicy chicken with a thick tomato and onion sauce) were popular, and mixed well together. 

T'hukpa on the left, Chicken Chili top center, Khana on the right

We forgot to order samosas, but by the end of the meal not even Quinten wanted more to eat. We had polished off all but the last few stubborn grains of rice. I assured my family that leaving a little food was the Nepali way of showing that you definitely had enough to eat.

I didn't use the spoon to put food in my mouth! I promise!

Now that I have dragged you through my nostalgia, I might as well make you hungry as well. And perhaps convince you to visit Lumbini.

Thakali is the ethnic group from which this food originates, but most Nepali people call it khana (food). Everything was there, starting with the rice in the middle. If you have ever eaten in Nepal, you will instantly realize that there is not nearly enough rice on that plate to qualify for dhal-bhat, but whenever I started to run out of rice, or dhal, or veggies, they offered me more! Just like in Nepal! No extra charge! Every food on this plate has a very different flavor profile. You can mix and match so that every bite tastes slightly different. 

For the tour of the khana, I am going to start on the plate at the 9:00 position with the slices of raw cucumber and carrot. They are the easiest food to identify other than the rice in the middle, and give us a good starting point. They are also the simplest flavor to describe, because like the rice they are prepared with no seasoning at all.

Moving clockwise, at 10:00 is a tomato preserve (gohlbayda achar). I know that it is made by scorching the tomatoes under a flame, but I'm not sure what happens after that. I suspect that the tomato repents of its sins and becomes an angel. An angel with an acidic profile.

Next is a metal bowl of dhal--lentil curry. A thick, hearty soup, mildly seasoned, that will power you up for a long day, and later help you to make entertaining noises. The thing at noon that looks like a giant corn chip is a fried spicy bean-flour papadum. Crispy, with a little bit of its own, it offers a nice textural counterpart to the rest.

Thakali Khana

Just to the right of the papadum is the meat curry. They offer chicken, lamb, pork or goat. I went with goat (this time) because goat is The GOAT: greasy, because they don't trim off the fat or skin, stewed slowly to make it tender, long enough that the cartilage becomes soft. Exquisite spices. The bowl looks tiny, but it is actually the right amount of meat. In Nepali cuisine the meat is usually not the center of the meal, but a side dish that enhances the rice. And boy does it.

The next little shallow dish at 2:00 has curried potatoes, which could have passed for an exotic potato salad if it had been chilled.

Next to it at 3:00 are a couple of pickled green chili peppers, and a 4:30 a pickle called "sinky" (rhymes with the toy slinky). It is made by slicing long white radishes into strips, then drying them in the sun for a few days. This gives them a unique texture, a bit tough and chewy for a vegetable, but not fibrous at all. They are then marinated in spices, mustard oil, and mystery. It was one of my favorite side dishes back in the day. There is a Korean kimchi that is similar, but not as good.

At 6:00 we have spinach, cooked quickly and simply in a pan with almost no spices. A solid dose of green to the plate, and another unique flavor to add to the palate, and at 7:00 we have our last entry, curried broccoli. 

Not pictured is the clarified butter, much to my shame. They charge extra for it, but oh my goodness is it worth it! They bring it in extremely hot, and add it to the dhal and the rice. It sizzles when it hits, and makes the food scalding hot for a minute, which means you shouldn't try to eat it. Damn the torpedoes and burn my fingers I ate anyway. Totally worth it.

In the past, McDonald's was my weekly taste of home, and I still like to have a Sausage Egg McMuffin and hashbrown from time to time. But now Lumbini is my taste of home, even though Nepal was only my home for two years. I'm glad my family likes the flavor of my past. I hope to bring them back many times.