If you’re beyond the wide-eyed excitement of seeing restaurants and cafes crop up in the Valley like no one’s business, and have realised with sad resignation that momos, chicken chilli and beer are the very usual suspects everywhere, then you’d better hie thee to Ramalaya in Panipokhari. Chef Mohit Rana awaits with delicacies you’d never dream of finding in momoland.

The last time I was in Ramalaya, for the launch of Manjushree Thapa’s Seasons of Flight, we slaked our thirst with aila and filled up on Newari tidbits from Thamel’s Newa de Café. Ramalaya’s own interior and home products were tucked into a couple of elaborately decorated showrooms facing onto the expansive, manicured grounds where the literati were gathered. Not being much of a shopper I didn’t expect to be back, so it was a pleasant surprise to hear of a food-tasting at Ramalaya’s Tea Room, courtesy in-house chef Mohit Rana.

Now Chef Mohit has already had a glorious run this year with Mitra Café which, by all accounts, furnished a rare spread of exquisite organic creations. But my already high expectations were surpassed at Ramalaya. Perhaps I should blame the Bloody Mary Shrimp in Chinese soup spoons that greeted me in the wake of a refreshing iced coffee? I’d barely settled in when another platter raised my eyebrows, then another. I’m rather more accustomed to oohing and aahing over a single wondrous appetizer at a time – what does one do when there’s several on a plate, except demand of the chef, “um, how long does this take you to do, you know, in real time?” “Two or three days,” he murmured, hinting at the trouble he goes to in visualising, sourcing and then preparing his dishes.

How about olives stuffed into cherry tomatoes, soft lines of cream cheese on baby carrots, slight open sandwiches of parma ham, tender raspberry and date drop scones, and olive tapenade on goat’s cheese? All delightful, all prepared with painstaking care, and all gleefully accepted, flowers and all. Flowers? Yes, some unidentified purple garnishes on the baby carrots, and thyme in the spoons of shrimp. There was more, of course, even apart from the classy orange, pistachio and black olive biscotti piled up in a glass bowl that I ruefully wished I’d tried, as I resisted soiling my palate at the wedding I had to dash to.

Ramalaya’s Tea Room is open for lunch and high tea, with dinner planned post-monsoon. I suggest you make your way to the best chef in town while you can still get in.

www.rde.com.np

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My first thought as I sidled into the Nepal Army Auditorium was, ‘this place is surely more suited to Pakistani pop than French jazz’. Or was it Pakistani pop that went better with the middle-aged, middle class martial décor of the place, complete with huge, clumsy murals of stupas and temples on both sides, crossed wooden guns on the ceiling, and an assortment of flags gripped in fists sticking out of the walls? Idle thoughts perhaps, but the explosive, improvisational jazz of Ozma never quite leapt off the stage last year.

This is not to take anything away from the music of Sajjad Ali, Pakistani pop icon and general charmer. Maybe he just felt at home with the audience, who thrilled knowingly to his mixture of jiving urdu pop, traditional, and the odd ghazal. Certainly he was very gracious to the audience, who reciprocated in kind. A bevy of Muslim ladies up front made up the core of the faithful, but it was not exclusively them that Sajjad addressed when he exhorted the audience to clap, sing and tell him just who his soniye, his golden girl, was.

It was a rare event, one that marked the 50th anniversary of Nepal-Pakistan diplomatic relations, and rarer still for affording one a glimpse of the Pakistani ambassador, Syed Abrar Hussain (the last time I saw another Pakistani ambassador was in India, at this year’s Jaipur festival, then introducing the poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz). Over-exposure to his Indian and American counterparts, and various Eurobassadors, leaves me wondering if Nepal hasn’t neglected its other neighbours. How little we know of Pakistan, and how that has been overshadowed by its tumultous recent history! “I Looooove Pakistani music,’ gushed the over-excitable MC, “But I hardly know anything about it.”

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This one’s a real tuckaway, and perhaps one that deserves to remain so, if only for the continued patronage of those who’ve discovered it through dint of cultured curiosity. Hint: it’s above the Fuji Bakery and you’d be forgiven (though hungry) for retreating after opening the door to the sight of fine textiles on racks. Which they also sell, along with a fine selection of pan-Asian and continental dishes.

Try the Greek Taramo for starters, if you like (and you should like) smoked salmon and salmon pate on bread. If you feel a little bolder, lively up the Newar in you and order a few slices of rare buff to boot, as much of a riposte to carpaccio as kachila is to steak tartare. For the mains, to the strains of opera-lite, you have a choice of cutlets and steaks and what better to wash it all down than good old Star Beer, of tasty 7.5% vintage? My companion figured the plum soda was better, and she preferred the salad to her fatty pork, but we both rolled out feeling beery, and porky, and well done.

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A good martini, it seems, makes an impression. Even better if a curl of citrus is suspended in the clear waters, tantalisingly calling to you. To resist is merely to desist, and what could be the point of that in the smaller scheme of things?

Casa de Cass is a fine spot for lunch, as UN House has discovered, but an even better plot for evening dining, perhaps because of the absence of said UN stiffs. You may well have the place to yourself, unless the owner drops in for a chat, and the attentive waiter will make sure you don’t regret your privacy as you float on the elongated notes of Chet Baker. A big bottle of red, then, and a neat triplet of bacon wrapped chicken in white sauce; a slab of king fish for my opposite number. We ate well, and drank even more. The martini was superfluous, but isn’t that the point?

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The following evening, plans for a Nepali New Year’s do obliterated by the mere thought of hundreds of loutish youths padding through the gallis of Thamel, as well as a reluctance to shell out a 1000 smackeroos to schmooze with the same people in the same places, I made very ordinary plans: dinner with a friend at New Orleans, Jhamel. The rains came thundering down as I trotted into the joint and, pleasant thoughts of aforementioned louts flashflooded into city gutters flashing through my mind’s eye, I walked past a depressed looking jazz band and joined my company. The place was packed (like every other place on the Jhamel strip, which continues to impress with the predominance of a Nepali clientele), and I settled down for the very last beer session of the year.

New Orleans Thamel and Jhamel has for me a reputation of being a safe option. The menu is rather limited, but the nosh is solid and the dosh aint’ too bad, relatively woofing. So a steak it was, with a decent pepper sauce. Increasingly one gets to choose how the ole slab o meat should be done, rather than settle for well-done and chewy, with a side of well-done and chewy chips. Steak culture is developing apace in Kathmandu (if not in the Khumbhu, where I overheard a trekker commenting on a ‘yak steak’: Hmm, it’s gamey). Padma Ratna Tuladhar would be proud.

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Unseriously, I am considering going vegetarian for the most pathetic reason possible – in the wake of a flurry of luncheons and dinners across the culinary pleasuredome that is Patan, I feel a little…ill.

It all started last year. The penultimate day of 2066, that is, when a colleague and I figured, finally, that we’d stop whining about the cold, congealed kachauras of chana at our local eatery (and the steaming wai wai accessorised by the sahuni’s filthy black fingerdips), and hotfoot it to Jawalakhel. “Where’s Chopstix,” I wondered, until I realised I’d already been in this second-floor establishment in Kumaripati the year before. Not that it was unmemorable – I recalled the clean lines of the long, narrow dining section and the reasonably priced, decent Chinese fare, and the ‘cool’ bar within. It’s just that in this dog’s life, certain evenings blur into others, and nights out, rather than standing crisply upright in fully-charged memory banks, tend to be lumped under ‘bhatti’, ‘bar’, ‘restura’ or ‘party’.

I digress. We headed to the sofa set bar, which didn’t look as ‘cool’ by day, not least because of the Bollywood trivia on the flat screen above us. But the Mongolian Chicken was hot enough, certainly more so than the bland Kung Pao Chicken and the Chicken Chowmein. And the milk tea tasted like coffee. Actually, it was coffee. It mattered not a jot as I scraped all the food groups into my bowl and scarfed ‘em down happily. If there’s one thing I appreciate, it’s a bellyful of food. Ah, the days of fat, greasy chips after disconsolate portions of Thai food in London Town, preferably consumed in full view of the stingy restura!

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Narayanghat is little more than a highway town, and a weekend on its outskirts, skirting the Narayani River, left me with few impressions of the city itself. Of course I remember the river, cityside of Chitwan National Park. We camped on the beach, failed to hook a single fish, and drowned our sorrows in the local produce. Gorkha Brewery’s generator thrummed night and day downstream from where we were, and I couldn’t help wondering what the rhinos (whose pugmarks were clearly visible in the sand around where we’d sheltered) made of it. We made the best of it.

In the road: bogged down on the banks of the Narayani

Narayanghat is the highway town the brewery came to. But there was one thing that made an impression on all of us. Who’d have thought it would be the dhido? Pate Dhido may appear humble from the outside, but its clean and cheerful riverside tables, and superlative corn mash with chicken curry — all washed down with plenty of cold beer, naturally — were a real find. Time and again we summoned the waiter for another ladle of dhido, and if the kitchen seemed a little taken aback (“ajhai re?”) after a fifth serving for one of the lads (not me, no), they were more than obliging. A bandh the following day gave us the opportunity to revisit, and when yet another angle yielded no more than a tangle, we headed over to the fish market.

More than meets the eye: Pate Dhido and its trademark dish

Postscript:

Perhaps our methods were fundamentally unsound. Why while away a weekend with a solitary rod at your disposal if you can commandeer a bulldozer to divert a channel of the river just outside the national park, spread a mahajal across the breadth of it, and scoop out between 400 to 500 kilograms of fish in one fell swoop? This, according to a witness, is exactly what happened the weekend after we visited, where we’d cast our lines.

But this how fishing is done in Nepal these days – along with the time-tested strategies of electrocuting or poisoning with fungicide whole stretches of water. Never mind the law, never mind the tragedy of the commons. At this rate, our rivers are due to be transformed into dead conduits from the Himalaya to the Ganges, only enlivened by sewage as they pass through our blighted cities.

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