Patna 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.

Ask for ghee on the litti. Stalls hold it back unless told, and a dry one is a mouthful of powder. Order chokha as its own plate rather than assuming it arrives attached. Two or three litti is a portion for most people, and four is optimism that fades within the hour. Sattu sharbat is a hot-weather drink and nothing else. Patna's summer runs from late March into June, and a bad May in the city sits around 45°C — that is when the roadside sattu counters are busiest and when the drink makes any sense. In the cold months it is simply the wrong thing to order. Buy khaja on the day you mean to eat it, not the day you leave. If you can time a visit around Chhath, do. In 2026 the festival runs 13 to 16 November: the evening arghya to the setting sun falls on Sunday the 15th, the dawn arghya to the rising sun on Monday the 16th. Thekua is what the festival is made of — wheat flour, jaggery and ghee, pressed into a wooden saancha mould and deep-fried. Book the train early if you are coming then. Bihar-bound services fill well ahead of Chhath, and the railways put on thousands of extra trains precisely because the ordinary ones cannot cope.

Litti is traveller's food that never stopped being made. Sattu is the reason it worked: chana is roasted and milled, and after that it needs only water, which made it the thing a farmer carried to the field and the thing an army could move on. K.T. Achaya's history of Indian food finds sattu listed among the foods of the Indo-Gangetic plain in a sixteenth-century text, so there are roughly five documented centuries behind the glass you get handed at a cart. The litti itself Bihar gives to Magadha, whose capital Pataliputra lies buried under the modern city. The frugal origin still shows on the plate. Chokha is vegetables cooked directly on the fire, because the fire is already lit for the litti. Ghugni is black chana boiled with spices and not a great deal else. Sweets are where the region allowed itself some extravagance, and tellingly the two best known are not Patna's. Khaja is twelve to sixteen paper-thin sheets of dough, stacked and fried, and it belongs to Silao in Nalanda district, which won a GI tag for it in December 2018; the halwais there credit the local water and climate for the crispness. The motichoor laddu belongs to Maner, twenty-four kilometres west, where the sellers credit the water of the Son. Patna sells both. It invented neither, and any Bihari will tell you so before you ask.