Eat like a local
Gujarat
A Gujarati thali — rotli, dal, shaak, farsaan and a touch of something sweet.
City-by-city food walks worth travelling for — the dishes, the lanes they live in and the right time to go, one stop at a time.
31 trails · 30 cities · every dish photographed for real
AhmedabadKhao Gali, Law Garden, Ahmedabad
Every evening the pavement beside Law Garden turns into Ahmedabad's favourite khao gali — a lane of vegetarian stalls where woks flare over gobi manchurian, grilled sandwiches disappear under grated cheese, and families graze from cart to cart until late. It is loud, buttery, strictly veg and completely Amdavadi.
5 stopsEvening_01.jpg/1920px-Manek_Chowk_(Ahmedabad)_01.jpg)
AhmedabadManek Chowk Ahmedabad
By day Manek Chowk is a jewellery bazaar; after 9 pm the goldsmiths' square becomes Ahmedabad's legendary night food market. Cheese butter dosas sizzle on giant tawas, pav bhaji is mashed under mountains of butter, and sitaphal shakes close the night — all vegetarian, all eaten at folding tables in a 600-year-old square.
3 stopsNight time
AmritsarAmritsar Food Walk
Amritsar is Punjab at the table — rich, buttery and generous. Around the old city near the Golden Temple you will find crisp Amritsari kulchas, dhaba dal simmered overnight, fried river fish, thick lassi in tall glasses and hot jalebi. This walk strings together the institutions that have been feeding the city for generations.
5 stopsBreakfast and evenings, October to March
BengaluruBengaluru Thindi Trail
Bengaluru snacks in Kannada — thindi — and takes it seriously: rava idli where it was invented, benne dose glossed with butter in Malleshwaram, a whole street in VV Puram that exists only to feed you, and ragi mudde in the old military hotels. This trail eats the city's tiffin culture from morning to well past dark.
5 stopsYear-round; VV Puram after sunset; avarebele season in winter
BhopalBhopal Food Trail
Bhopal eats in two registers that barely touch each other. The morning one is poha: flattened rice, pale and unstirred, vanishing under chopped raw onion and a heap of sev, with a slice of lemon left on the rim of the plate for you to squeeze yourself and a jalebi sharing the same plate rather than following it. The evening one is Chatori Gali, the narrow lane in Ibrahimpura where the old city keeps its kebab griddles and its nihari pots. The lane is close to dead in daylight and fills as the sun drops behind Bhoj Taal. This is one of the few Indian cities where the Muslim old-city kitchen is the mainstream local food rather than a speciality, and the register is Afghan-Mughal by way of the Begums: gravies built slowly on browned onion, with kulcha to mop. Be clear-eyed about what the lane is. It is built around meat, and around buffalo in particular, so a vegetarian evening there comes down to a plate of aloo and a lot of watching other people eat. The New Market side of the city is the better call if you do not eat meat. Nothing in Chatori Gali is arranged for comfort either. There is no silverware and there are no chairs worth the name, so you stand and eat while the crowd works its way past you.
6 stopsPoha in the morning, the old city after dark; November to February
BikanerBikaner Food Trail
Two things carry the eating here, and both come out of hot oil or hot milk. Mornings are kachori, a fried pastry with a spiced pulse filling, split and flooded with sabji at a counter on Station Road. Evenings belong to chhena and mawa. In between sits the thing the town is famous for, and the honest advice about it is not the advice you expect: Bikaneri bhujia is sold in packets in every grocery in India by companies that grew out of this town, and buying that packet here is a wasted errand. What is worth walking into Bhujia Bazaar for is the batch pressed through a sieve into oil that morning — the local convention is that day-old bhujia does not sell, so freshness is a question you are allowed to ask. None of this is heat food. Bikaner in May is a furnace, and the season that works runs roughly October to March.
6 stopsOctober to March — this is fried, ghee-heavy food and the desert summer defeats it
ChennaiChennai Tiffin Trail
Chennai runs on tiffin: idlis under a flood of sambar in Triplicane, ghee roast dosas folded like architecture in Mylapore, filter kaapi cooled between davara and tumbler, sundal on the Marina at sunset, and the clang of kothu parotta blades after dark. This trail eats the city's day in order.
5 stopsMornings and evenings; the Marina at dusk
DelhiOld Delhi Food Walk
The lanes of Old Delhi around Chandni Chowk are one of India's great street-food grounds — a dense maze of centuries-old shops selling parathas, kebabs, chaat, jalebi and kulfi. This walk threads the classics on foot, from the deep-fried breads of Paranthe Wali Gali to the Mughlai kitchens near Jama Masjid, best done hungry and in the cooler evening hours.
6 stopsEvenings, October to March
GoaGoa Food Trail
Goa's real food happens away from the beach shacks: fish-curry-rice at a Panjim lunch counter, choris strings at the Mapusa market, vindaloo and xacuti simmering in the tavernas, ros omelette from an evening cart eaten with poee from the village baker, and bebinca built layer by patient layer. This trail eats Goa the way Goans do.
5 stopsNovember to February; Mapusa on a Friday
GuwahatiGuwahati Assamese Food Trail
Assamese food surprises people arriving from the rest of India. Cream is rare and the base cooking carries almost no chilli heat; the flavour is built on alkalinity and sourness instead. The centre of it in Guwahati is a thali, and the thing worth knowing before you sit down is that it is meant to be eaten in a fixed order rather than grazed across. My position, and it is a position rather than a fact: this is home cooking before it is restaurant cooking, and the kitchens doing it properly are outnumbered by north Indian and Chinese ones, so a good Assamese plate here takes finding. Guwahati also holds a large Naga and wider Northeastern eating scene, which is excellent and is a separate cuisine. Mid-January is when the pitha get made, if the dates are yours to pick.
6 stopsMid-January for pitha and Magh Bihu; the cold months either side for duck
HyderabadHyderabad Old City Food Trail
Hyderabad's old city eats like the court it once was: kacchi dum biryani under sealed lids, haleem pounded smooth through Ramzan, kebabs cooked on stone, and Irani chai poured milky beside the Charminar. This trail circles the lanes around the monument, from the biryani houses to the sweet finish of qubani ka meetha.
5 stopsEvenings; Ramzan for haleem
IndoreIndore Food Trail
Indore eats on a schedule of its own: poha-jalebi from brass handis at breakfast, and a jewellery lane that turns into a midnight food bazaar. This trail runs the full day — Chappan Dukan in the morning, then Sarafa after dark, where the dahi bada flies and the rabri pans never empty.
5 stopsAfter dark for Sarafa; October to March for the full menu
JaipurJaipur Food Walk
Jaipur's food is ghee-rich, vegetarian and unapologetic about both: kachoris fried before the city is fully awake, lassi in clay kulhads on MI Road, ghewar stacked high in Johari Bazaar and dal baati churma eaten with your hands. This walk runs the pink city's classics from breakfast to kulfi.
5 stopsOctober to March; kachori before 11 am_Colorful_Bazaar_at_city_center_(32918001792).jpg/1920px-India_(Jodhpur)_Colorful_Bazaar_at_city_center_(32918001792).jpg)
JodhpurJodhpur Food Trail
The two dishes Jodhpur is actually known for are both fried and both a trap. Mirchi bada is a whole green chilli, slit, packed with spiced potato and jacketed in gram-flour batter — larger than it looks and milder than it sounds. Mawa kachori looks exactly like its savoury cousin and is nothing of the kind: milk solids, crushed nuts and sugar syrup inside a fried shell. Between the two sits makhaniya lassi, saffron buttermilk thick enough to want a spoon, and the counter most associated with it stands directly opposite the Clock Tower. There is almost nothing green on this walk, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Marwari cooking took shape where fresh vegetables did not reliably grow, so the plate leans on things that dry and keep, bound together with a great deal of ghee. Two days of it is superb. On the third your body files a complaint, so build in a break. The lanes around the Clock Tower are a working bazaar before they are a food destination — vegetables and cloth are what most of the stalls are actually selling, and the crowd moves at market speed. Step out of the flow to eat rather than trying to eat inside it.
6 stopsOctober to March, with mid-November to mid-February the coolest of it
KaraikudiChettinad Food Trail, Karaikudi
The first thing to unlearn is the word. "Chettinad" on a menu almost anywhere in India means a dark, chilli-heavy gravy, and that dish is largely a restaurant invention — Anjappar, the chain that made the name famous, was founded in Chennai in 1964. Real Chettinad cooking leans on black pepper rather than chilli, uses coconut with restraint, and grinds its masala fresh for each dish. The Bangala describes it as spicy but not hot, which is exactly the distinction. Visitors who arrive expecting the restaurant version often decide the real thing is somehow not proper Chettinad. The second thing to unlearn is that this is a meat cuisine. The Nagarathar Chettiars were traditionally vegetarian and their ritual feasts still are. Chicken Chettinad is the tail wagging the dog; the dishes the community actually built its reputation on are things like kandarappam, kavuni arisi, paal paniyaram and uppu seedai. What makes the food taste of this place and nowhere else is a short list of spices used in combination — anasipoo, which is star anise, and kalpasi, a lichen sold as black stone flower, alongside fennel and a great deal of black pepper. Kalpasi is the one you will not have met elsewhere and the one that makes a Chettinad kuzhambu smell like Chettinad. And this is not a city trail. Chettinad is seventy-six villages — fifty-six in Sivaganga district and twenty in Pudukottai — spread over 1,550 square kilometres, with Karaikudi as the hub. You eat in restored mansions, and you drive between them.
3 stopsNovember to February, when the region is dry and cool enough to walk between mansions. Book meals ahead whatever the month — this is a region of houses that cook to order, not a restaurant strip.
KochiKochi Food Trail
Kochi eats the way a port city should — puttu steaming before sunrise, appam lace at the breakfast table, Malabar biryani in Mattancherry, karimeen crisping by the water, and pazham pori with hot chaya when the rain comes in. This trail runs the harbour city's classics from first light to tea time.
6 stopsSeptember to March; the monsoon has its own charm
KolkataKolkata Street Food Walk
Kolkata takes eating personally — the kathi roll, the sponge rosogolla and biryani with potato were all born here, and the streets still sell them the old way. This walk runs from the roll counters behind New Market through puchka carts and jhalmuri tins to the sweet shops of Bhowanipore, one Calcutta institution at a time.
6 stopsEvenings, October to March
KozhikodeKozhikode Malabar Food Trail
Kozhikode eats in two registers. There is the Mappila kitchen, which is coconut-heavy and built for a long lunch, and there is the beach, which is quick and fried and happens after dark. Keep the biryani for the middle of the day and give the evening to the stalls on the sand. The shellfish is the one thing worth planning a calendar around: green mussels on this coast run roughly November to May, so asking for kallummakkaya or arikkadukka in July gets you a polite no. One warning about the street everyone arrives for. SM Street is also Sweetmeat Street and Mittayi Theruvu, and it is a shopping street before it is a sweet one — cloth and household goods down most of its length, with the halwa counters holding a stretch of it rather than the whole thing. The halwa is real and it is very good. The lane of sweet shops people picture is not there. Buy by weight, then eat the rest of the day somewhere else in the city.
6 stopsNovember to May, when the mussels are in; evenings for the beach stalls
LucknowLucknow Awadhi Food Trail
Lucknow is the home of Awadhi cooking — slow-cooked, fragrant and refined, born in the kitchens of the Nawabs. This trail follows the legends: melt-in-the-mouth galouti kebabs, dum biryani, nihari with kulcha, and the city's famous milk sweets. Old Lucknow around Chowk and Aminabad is where to eat it.
5 stopsEvenings, October to March
MaduraiMadurai Food Trail
Plan two sittings here rather than three. Breakfast is worth getting up for, the evening is where the cooking this city is known for actually happens, and the stretch in between is thin enough that you are better off in the temple than at a table. Madurai calls itself Thoonga Nagaram, the city that never sleeps, and nothing about the way it eats has been arranged around office hours. The dish that belongs here and nowhere else is kari dosai: a plain dosa, a pepper-crusted omelette laid over it, minced mutton on top of that, built on the griddle in front of you. It is associated with the Konar shops around Simmakkal. Jigarthanda is the drink. Be warned that this is not the careful end of Tamil cooking. Madurai's mutton runs on masala dry-roasted and ground on the spot — fennel, cumin, black pepper, dried red chilli — and then cooked down in gingelly oil, and a single plate assumes someone who has been working since morning. Season matters as much as appetite here. March to July are the hottest months, summer maxima reach 42°C, and the temple streets give you nothing to walk in the shade of.
6 stopsBreakfast and after dark. January and February for the weather.
MangaluruMangaluru Coastal Food Trail
Mangaluru is three cuisines in one city that outsiders flatten into one. There is Tuluva and Bunt Hindu cooking, there is Mangalorean Catholic food, and there is Beary Muslim food, and they share a coastline and a coconut and very little else. The dish to understand first is kori rotti, because its name misleads everyone. The rotti is not bread. It is a wafer-thin, brittle dry rice sheet, and the point of the dish is that a red chicken gassi is poured over it at the table so it softens unevenly — crisp at the edges, sodden in the middle. In Tulu households it is Sunday food and festival food, not an everyday plate. Neer dosa is the other thing worth planning around: a batter thinned almost to water, poured onto a hot pan and left lace-thin and white, eaten with a curry rather than a chutney. And the Catholic table brings sanna, a steamed rice cake traditionally leavened with palm toddy — increasingly with yeast instead, because toddy is not reliably available any more. Two warnings, because this trail has two famous items that are not what they seem. Chicken ghee roast is sold as Mangaluru''s dish and was created up the coast at Kundapura, escaping south only when the family opened in Mangaluru in the early 1970s. And gadbad, the layered ice cream everybody queues for, is a 1970s parlour sundae — it is a fine thing and it is not Tuluva cuisine.
6 stopsNovember to February. It is dry, and it falls outside the fishing ban, so the sea fish this cuisine is built on is actually landing.
MumbaiMumbai Street Food Trail
Mumbai runs on street food, and this trail hits the essentials — the vada pav and pav bhaji the city made famous, seaside bhel puri at Chowpatty, the kebabs and rolls of the old Muslim quarters, and the Irani cafes of Fort. Fast, cheap and endlessly varied, it is best grazed across an evening.
5 stopsEvenings, November to February
MysuruMysuru Food Trail
Mysuru is a breakfast city that happens to own a palace. The dish worth travelling for is the Mylari dosa, which is not what the rest of India sells under the city's name. It comes off a cast-iron griddle pale and thick and deliberately soft, buttered while it is still on the pan. Coconut chutney comes beside it, and the masala version has an onion-and-potato sagu folded in. Arrive expecting the crisp red-chutney cone of Bengaluru and Mumbai menus and you will think the kitchen sent it out half-cooked. The other pillar is Mysore pak, which came out of the palace kitchen and is now made two ways. One is soft and collapses on the tongue, carrying a great deal of ghee. The other is harder and porous, made with ghee cut with oil. Shops sell both under the one name without saying which is in the tray, so ask. Past those two, Mysuru is a market town with an appetite. Devaraja Market has been trading since 1886 and sells jasmine and betel leaf as seriously as it sells vegetables. Mandi Mohalla cooks mutton pulao outdoors over firewood. And in the evening the churumuri carts go up across the city, tossing puffed rice with grated carrot and spiced peanuts into a paper cone that is never allowed to become a plate.
6 stopsOctober to February, the pleasant half of the year here, with nights down to about 15C. Dasara falls inside that window and fills the city.
NagpurNagpur Saoji Food Trail
Saoji began as the home cooking of one weaving community and ended up as the working lunch of a mill city. It is mutton and chicken, mostly, cooked slow in a dark masala of roasted spices and ground pastes, with a layer of red-orange oil sitting on the surface and jowar bhakri to push it around. The heat is not a garnish. Dry red chilli and black peppercorn are both structural, so it lands at the front of the mouth and again at the back, and anyone who orders full strength to prove a point spends the afternoon regretting it. Ask for it dialled down on the first plate. The honest caveat for vegetarians is that a traditional bhojnalaya has very little beyond dal and bhakri — though the street food outside it is another matter entirely, and most of this trail is meat-free: poha drowned in a chickpea gravy, or a samosa broken open and flooded with the same stuff. Come in the cold months.
6 stopsNovember to February for the weather. If the oranges are the point, stretch into March, when the sweeter Mrig crop matures.
PatnaPatna Food Trail
Patna's own food is cart food and it does not apologise for it. Litti is the thing to eat here — a wholewheat ball packed with spiced sattu and set straight onto charcoal until the crust blackens in patches. You break it open with a thumb rather than a knife. Ghee goes in while it is still too hot to hold. The chokha — brinjal and potato roasted on the same coals, then mashed — sits on its own plate beside it. Sattu is underneath most of the rest. It is gram, roasted and ground fine enough to eat with nothing done to it but the addition of water. That is what fills the litti and stuffs the paratha. It is also what Patna drinks once the heat lands, stirred into a glass and salted, sharp with lemon and cumin. The caveat needs saying plainly. Patna has a thin sit-down culture for its own cuisine. Most of the city's proper restaurants run the same generic North Indian menu you would find in Kanpur, and the Bihari food worth crossing town for is on a pavement or in somebody's house. If tablecloths matter to you, this trail will let you down. Come hungry and eat standing.
6 stopsNovember to February, when the city is cool enough to eat standing on a pavement. The sattu counters are a hot-season thing instead.
PunePune Food Trail
Pune's food lives in the peths, the old walled-city wards around Shaniwar Wada, and it does not travel across town. Koregaon Park and Baner are a perfectly good restaurant city with almost none of this cooking on the menu. Build the eating around Bajirao Road and Tulshibaug, and treat the rest of Pune as where you sleep. Misal is the dish to understand first. The word is Marathi for mixture, and it is meant literally: matki usal, which is sprouted moth beans, with farsan and raw onion over the top and the tarri poured on. Tarri is the spiced gravy, called kat or sample on most boards here, and it comes in colours — laal, kala, hirwa — according to what went into it. Around that sit three things worth building a morning around. Sabudana khichdi is sago, potato and coarsely crushed peanut, and it began as fasting food. Bakarwadi is a besan spiral fried tight around coconut and sesame. Mastani is a milkshake with ice cream dropped into it, and it wants a spoon. One expectation is worth resetting before you order. Puneri misal is generally reckoned the gentler one — Kolhapur's is the heat people have read about — and Pune leans on goda masala and coconut where Kolhapur leans on chilli. Do not take that as a rule. The same shop in Tulshibaug is recommended in one Pune misal survey as the place to go for a mildly spiced plate and headlined in another as the spiciest in town, and the survey calling it mild hands that title to Kata Kirr instead. Go in without a fixed idea of how hot Puneri misal is. The shop decides that here, not the city.
6 stopsNovember to February. The monsoon runs June to October and summer starts around mid-March, so the cool dry months are the ones for walking the peths. Misal early in the day, mastani once the heat is off the street.
PuriPuri Mahaprasad Trail
Start with the fact that decides whether this trail is even available to you. Only Hindus may enter the Jagannath Temple. A board at the Singhadwara says so in five languages, and the rule has been applied to ambassadors and heads of state — there is no ticket, donation or guide that changes it. Jains, Sikhs and Buddhists are treated as within the permitted category. That matters more here than at any other temple in India, because Ananda Bazar — the market where Mahaprasad is sold — is inside the walls, in the outer courtyard between the Meghanada Pacheri and the Kurma Bedha. Guides that cheerfully tell every reader to go and eat at Ananda Bazar are sending some of them to a gate they cannot pass. What is cooked in there is genuinely unlike anything else. The Rosaghara works on firewood alone, in unglazed earthen pots called kudua stacked vertically over one fire — Odisha Tourism's own description says the pot on top cooks first. No onion, no garlic, and nothing tasted before it is offered. Fifty-six items, the chhapana bhoga, go up across six sittings a day. And the food only becomes Mahaprasad at the second offering: first to Jagannath, then re-offered to Devi Bimala. Before that step it is just very good temple cooking. The wet form is called Abadha, which Odias read as a-badha — food that never leaves the pot it was cooked and offered in. That is also why it does not travel, and why the only Mahaprasad you can legitimately carry home is the dry Sukhila Bhoga: khaja, khai, nadia kora.
5 stopsOctober to February, when Puri is warm rather than hot and you can walk Bada Danda. Check the temple calendar before the weather: for about a fortnight after Snana Purnima the deities are in Anasara, darshan stops and the usual Mahaprasad is not being offered.
ShillongShillong Khasi Food Trail
Two things decide whether this trail works, and neither is on a menu. The first is the day. Iewduh — Bara Bazar — is shut on Sundays, and so is most of the rest of the city''s eating. A visitor who allots one day to Shillong and picks a Sunday loses the entire market. The second is the hour. Khasi food here is a daytime cuisine. Jadoh stalls are lunch operations and thin out by about half past two; even the best-known Khasi room in Police Bazar is reported closing around half past seven. Plan an evening food crawl and you will find the Khasi half of the city shut and only the Chinese and north Indian places open — and then conclude, wrongly, that Shillong has no food of its own. What you are here for is jadoh: rice cooked with pork, and in the traditional version with pork blood, which is what gives it the dark colour. Around it come dohneiiong, pork with black sesame; dohkhlieh, a warm pork salad with onion; and tungrymbai, fermented soybean crushed to a paste — the one dish on this trail that visitors either love or cannot get past. Putharo and pumaloi are the steamed rice cakes alongside. And there is no beef ban in Meghalaya. Beef and pork are sold openly, side by side, which is not true of most of the country and is worth knowing before you order.
4 stopsOctober and November, and it is not a close call. The monsoon runs from late June into October beside the wettest places on earth, and Iewduh floods. Whatever month you pick, do not make it a Sunday.
SrinagarSrinagar Wazwan and Harissa Trail
Wazwan is not a menu, it is a seating plan. Guests sit in fours and eat from one large copper platter, the trami, heaped with rice and quartered with the dishes laid over it — tabak maaz, seekh kabab, methi maaz, and gushtaba, the big yoghurt-gravy meatball that marks the end of the main course. Hands are washed at the table from a portable basin that comes round before and after. The thirty-six courses you have read about are real and almost certainly not what you will be served. A full wazwan is a wedding-scale event, fifteen to thirty of its courses meat, cooked overnight by a brigade under a vasta waza. What a restaurant sells is a trami built for four with a handful of courses on it, and it usually wants notice. If you are travelling alone and you order wazwan, you have ordered a platter for four people. The other half of the trail is harissa, and it runs on a clock rather than a menu. It is cooked overnight in a mathh — a pot set into the ground with a firewood chamber below — for something like sixteen hours, and it is a winter food only. Shops in the old city start serving around seven in the morning and are commonly finished by ten. Regulars come straight from fajr. A guide offering you harissa in June is selling you something else.
4 stopsTwo different trips. For harissa, come between mid-October and March — it is a winter trade and does not exist in summer. For everything else, April to October is easier travelling.
SuratSurat Food Trail
"Surat nu jaman" — the food of Surat — is the half of the old Gujarati saying everyone can act on. This trail eats the diamond city's legends in order: locho steaming at breakfast, khaman and sev khamani by mid-morning, undhiyu in winter, ghari for Chandani Padva, and roasted ponk when the jowar fields say so.
5 stopsOctober to February for the full menu; ponk and undhiyu are winter dishes.jpg/1920px-Tamater_Chaat_(Tomato_Chaat).jpg)
VaranasiBanaras Food Trail
Banaras eats to the rhythm of its ghats: kachori-sabzi and jalebi before the morning aarti crowds thin, tamatar chaat in clay kulhads at Godowlia, lassi under a cap of malai at Lanka, and — on winter dawns — malaiyo, the saffron milk foam that melts before the sun is properly up. End, as the city insists, with a paan.
5 stopsOctober to March; malaiyo only on winter mornings
Eating your way somewhere?
Every trail city has a full guide — attractions, itineraries and when to go.