Altitude changes appetite, digestion and thirst. The menu is built around that, not around what photographs well.
The first thing altitude does is make you less thirsty than you are. The second is to slow digestion. A kitchen that ignores both will produce beautiful food that sits in guests like a stone.
Thirst arrives late
So we do not wait for it. Warm water with fennel goes to every room at seven, herbal infusions run all day, and there is a jug on every table before anyone asks.
Smaller, warmer, earlier
Dinner is at seven and it is the lightest meal of the day — the reverse of how most guests eat at home, and the change they most often keep. Lunch carries the weight: red rice from Kinnaur, rajma from the valley, seasonal greens cooked properly rather than blanched for colour.
Sea buckthorn needs jaggery rather than sugar, and the lemon goes in while it is still warm. That is the whole recipe and guests still ask for it.
Where the protein comes from
Dal, curd from the village, walnuts and paneer we set in the kitchen. We are vegetarian and we do not treat that as a constraint requiring apology or substitution — nothing on the menu is pretending to be meat.
Sattvic and Ayurvedic menus that change with the season, cooked from the valley and the orchard.
Cooks the Pahari food of her grandmother with a nutritionist reading over her shoulder.
1 comment
I expected worthy and dull. Instead siddu with walnut chutney, and a sea-buckthorn drink I have now failed to recreate twice.