This tiny little joint serves food that tastes like your mother’s home-cooked dishes.
If it is typical Nepali khana that you are craving, then Noyoz is the place for you. This tiny little joint in Bhatbhateni serves momos, aludum, meat and more meat, and they all taste like your mother’s home-cooked dishes.
Pics: RUBY TUESDAY
Don’t go to Noyoz looking for ambience or fine decor and you will walk out deeply satisfied. This very basic eatery, run by a Limbu couple and named after their adorable daughter, specialises in one thing: good basic food at very reasonable prices. Originally from Dharan, Barsha Limbu, the proprietor and chef all rolled into one, learned cooking from her mother, grandmother, and her many aunts. And she tries to emulate their style in her own kitchen by serving up nutritious, hearty, and wholesome meals with a special eastern touch.
The aludum with roti (Rs 100) is the real deal. Authentic aludum is plain boiled potatoes dunked and cooked in a hot chili sauce without the addition of tons of masala and onion and garlic and tomatoes and the serving is perfect for a filling lunch. Sargemba (Rs 150), the Limbu version of blood sausage, has minced pork and blood mixed with edible moss, dried and boiled in ash, sourced from the hills of Taplejung. It is mild and best had warm- truly delicious.
The folks at Noyoz claim that theirs is simply the best Dharane pork momos (Rs 95) in town and I have to agree. Soft and moist, the flavour of the meat is accentuated by a tinge of ginger and the crunch of chopped onions. The masala-free dumplings (masala is the death of many a good plate of momo), come with a hot bowl of soup. After discovering Noyoz, I doubt I’ll ever cook momos at home again. We polished off two plates very quickly and would have ordered more if we didn’t have the pork leg curry with roti (Rs 150) begging for our attention.
Pork feet or if you prefer euphemisms, trotters, come cooked long enough for the flavours of tomatoes and chilies to saturate and soften even the bones, in a thick spicy sauce. I personally think it goes better with rice than rotis, but that’s just my personal taste. Regardless, the dish remains true to the spirit of Dharan and its eternal love affair with pork.
The smoked pork chop with steamed vegetables (Rs 195) is the dish that sealed the deal for us. The pork is slow smoked over a wood fire by Barsha’s aunt in Dharan and can only be found at Noyoz in Kathmandu. The almost peaty flavour of the wood combined with the seasonings and the charred bits make this dish addictive. It’s been almost two weeks since my visit and I can still clearly recall the taste, yum. Noyoz is definitely going to be revisited, many, many times.
Non-pork eaters and vegetarians fret not, Noyoz serves a variety of vegetarian dishes. In a relatively short time Noyoz has become extremely popular among nomadic writers, artists, and musicians from east Nepal (and they have quite a huge diaspora in the capital) and it has taken on the air of an ‘intellectual adda’. They congregate here to talk about all things Nepal while eating bona fide purveli meals, just like back home.
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