Srinagar 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.

HARISSA IS A MORNING ERRAND IN WINTER. Mid-October to March, roughly. Serving starts about 7 a.m. and a busy shop is sold out by 10. Do not plan it for lunch and do not plan it for July. WAZWAN NEEDS NUMBERS AND NOTICE. Four people is the unit. Most places want advance notice for a proper trami, and a solo order is a waste of both money and food. DO NOT LEAVE FOOD ON THE TRAMI. Sharing from one platter with three others has its own etiquette, and clearing what is put in front of your quarter is part of it. Take less rather than leaving more. GUSHTABA MEANS STOP. It is the structural full stop of the meal. When it arrives, the savoury courses are over. NOON CHAI IS SALT, NOT SUGAR. The pink comes from chemistry rather than colouring: gunpowder green tea boiled about an hour with baking soda, quenched with iced water and aerated by ladling. It is salted. Ordering it expecting sweet tea is the commonest mistake a visitor makes at breakfast. ON THE WINTER. Chillai Kalan, the deep cold, runs 21 December to 29 January, followed by Chillai Khurd to 18 February and Chillai Bachha to 28 February. That is harissa season at its best and travel at its hardest. THE OLD CITY IS A WORKING NEIGHBOURHOOD. The shrines you pass between harissa shops are places of worship, not monuments. Dress accordingly and ask before photographing anyone at work.

The old city is the address for both. Ahdoos on Residency Road was founded in 1918 by Haji Mohammad Sultan, who had learned baking in Calcutta, and it is the senior name in Srinagar dining. Mughal Darbar, also on Residency Road, dates itself to 1984 and is the other name every local gives. Harissa is older and more domestic. The shops sit around Nawakadal, Fateh Kadal and Aali Kadal in the old city, several of them third-generation or claiming far longer, and they are one-product businesses that shut for half the year. The bakers, the kandur, are a separate trade again, turning out tsot, girda, lavasa and czochworu from tandoors set into the wall — bread in Kashmir is bought twice a day and is not a side dish.