Famous Food of Dehradun: 12 Garhwali and Doon Dishes to Try, and Where

Ask what Dehradun is famous for eating and you will get two answers. The quick one is street food: bun tikki, katlambe chole, momos, which our street food guide covers stall by stall. The deeper one is Garhwali cooking, the food of the hills the valley sits under, which most visitors never taste because it lives in homes and at a handful of restaurants rather than on the main road. This guide is the deeper answer: twelve dishes, what each one actually is, and the kind of place that does it right. We eat this food at home; it is the cooking we grew up with.

The Garhwali kitchen in one paragraph

Garhwal is high, cold and short of flat land, so its cooking leans on what grows on terraces and survives winter: millets (mandua and jhangora), hill lentils (gahat, urad, tor), hardy greens, potatoes, hemp seed, mountain ghee and a few sharp spices, above all jakhiya, the tiny seed that crackles in hot oil. Dishes are cooked slowly in iron pots over wood, which gives the dals their dark colour and the greens their depth. Nothing is rich in the restaurant sense. Everything tastes of the place.

The dishes to order

1. Kafuli

The signature. Spinach and fenugreek leaves cooked down for hours with a little rice flour until they turn into a thick, dark green curry, finished with ghee. Eaten with rice. If you order one Garhwali dish, make it this.

2. Chainsoo

Black urad dal, dry-roasted until nutty, ground coarse and simmered with garlic and ghee into a dark, almost smoky dal. Heavy, warming, built for winter nights, and the dish Garhwalis away from home miss most.

3. Phaanu

Lentils (gahat or a mix) soaked overnight, ground to a paste and cooked into a thin, spiced stew that is poured over rice. Lighter than chainsoo and the everyday dal in many hill homes.

4. Aloo ke gutke

Boiled potatoes cut into chunks and tossed in hot oil with jakhiya, red chilli and coriander. It sounds simple and it is; the jakhiya makes it. Served at weddings, festivals, roadside dhabas and every Garhwali thali.

5. Kandali ka saag

Stinging nettle, picked with gloves, blanched and cooked like spinach with jakhiya and ghee. Nutritious, slightly bitter, and a hill-village dish you will only find in season at the Garhwali places and in homes.

6. Gahat (kulath) dal

Horse gram, the hardiest lentil in the hills, cooked slowly into a dark soup. Garhwalis swear by it for winter warmth and for kidney stones; either way it tastes of iron pots and wood smoke.

7. Mandua roti

Rotis made from finger millet flour: dark, dense, nutty, best hot with white butter or ghee and a smear of bhang chutney. The hill bread, now sold as a health food in Delhi at four times the price.

8. Bhang ki chutney

Roasted hemp seed ground with coriander, green chilli and lemon or sour curd into a nutty, sharp chutney. Perfectly legal (it is the seed, not the leaf), and the thing that lifts aloo ke gutke and mandua rotis. The dry mix is sold in Paltan Bazaar if you want to take it home.

9. Jhangora kheer

Barnyard millet cooked in milk with sugar and cardamom. Lighter than rice kheer, slightly grainy, and the dessert on every Garhwali thali.

10. Arsa

The festival sweet: rice flour and jaggery pressed into discs and deep-fried in ghee, made in big batches for weddings and Diwali and sent to relatives in the plains. Dense, chewy, keeps for weeks.

11. Bal mithai and singori

Strictly Kumaoni, from Almora, but adopted by every sweet shop in Dehradun: bal mithai is dark khoya fudge rolled in white sugar balls, and singori is khoya wrapped in a malu leaf that scents it. Our things to buy guide has the shops.

12. The Doon basmati

Not a dish but the grain under half of them. Dehraduni basmati, aged a year or two, long and fragrant, is what the valley is famous for across India. A plain plate of it with kafuli is the most Dehradun meal there is.

Where to eat it

• A Garhwali thali restaurant. A small number of places in Dehradun cook the full table; they change, so our best restaurants guide keeps the current names under Garhwali and Pahari flavours. Go for lunch; several sell out of the slow dishes by evening.
• Festival and fair stalls. Uttarakhand food stalls at the winter fairs and the Igas and Diwali season markets serve arsa, aloo ke gutke and mandua rotis cheaply and well.
• Dhabas on the hill roads. The Mussoorie and Chakrata roads have dhabas that do aloo ke gutke and a dal with rice for a few hundred rupees. Ask for jakhiya and they will know you have done your homework.
• A home-cooked thali. The best version is the one cooked in a kitchen. Several of our guests have had a Garhwali thali brought to the home for a family dinner; message us on WhatsApp and we will arrange it where we can.
• Your own kitchen. Every Starfish home has one. Buy jakhiya, mandua and gahat in Paltan Bazaar and try aloo ke gutke yourself; it is a ten-minute dish.

For the street side of Dehradun's food, the street food guide walks from the Clock Tower to Paltan Bazaar; for cafés and bakeries, the best cafés in Dehradun. Check live availability at our homes and message us on WhatsApp if you want the home-cooked thali on your first night.