At Chor Bizarre in New Delhi, a Kashmiri Pandit thali at a popup did not just recreate flavours, but offered a quieter, more deliberate way of remembering. Curated by journalist Kaveree Bamzai, the limited-period menu was rooted not in nostalgia for return, but in preserving memory, ritual, and cultural continuity through food.
Kashmiri Pandits, Bamzai points out, have lived with displacement since 1990. “Whether you want to call it self-exiled or exiled from Kashmir,” she says, “the idea of going back now is something that is just a romantic sort of dream.” The thali draws from lived memory, particularly Bamzai’s childhood summers in Kashmir during the 1970s. Though born and brought up in Delhi, she spent summers at her maternal grandfather’s home. Like many of its time, it was built for gathering, with gardens, apple trees, a vegetable patch, and space for weddings.
Food was central to these gatherings. Lunches and dinners were eaten together in a large hall, everyone seated on the floor on small chorkis, except for her grandfather, who sat on a chair. “The youngest would usually be right at the end of the line,” Bamzai says, smiling, “and would get virtually nothing of the mutton dishes.” Those meals shaped her understanding of food as collective memory.
The menu at the popup also unsettles popular assumptions about Kashmiri Pandit cuisine. “The whole idea that we are just a community of meat eaters is not exactly true,” she explains. Vegetarian food is central, shaped by geography and season. “We used what we had, what we got locally.”
This philosophy extends to technique. Kashmiri Pandit cooking avoids onion, garlic, and tomatoes, relying instead on ginger, fennel, turmeric, and Kashmiri chilli. Dishes like haak—greens cooked simply with oil and dried red chillies—sits at the emotional centre of the thali. “In the plains, dal-chawal is the soul food,” Bamzai says. “For us, it’s haak and plain white rice.” Paneer, ubiquitous elsewhere, is rare.
Translating home food into a restaurant setting, however, required negotiation. “Almost all the dishes are authentic,” Bamzai says, noting that tomato paneer was the one conscious deviation. Traditionally, Kashmiri Pandit paneer is cooked in turmeric, not tomato. “This was a concession to the regular palate of people who visit restaurants,” she explains. “When we first tasted the thali, we actually felt it was too authentic. Not everybody likes that.”
She was particularly proud of including dishes rarely seen even in Kashmiri Pandit restaurants—soonth bangun, brinjal cooked with green apple, and dal with lotus stem. “These are things I grew up with,” she says. “I had them in my aunts’ homes as well.” Lightly spiced, they reflect a home-cooking philosophy where “less is more.” That principle also governs meat dishes, where even the cut matters. “Every kind of mutton dish has a different cut,” Bamzai notes. Some elements, like the kabarga or the gravy-heavy dum aloo, were adjusted slightly for a wider clientele.
Dessert, too, reveals something unusual about Kashmiri food culture. “We don’t have such a variety of sweet dishes,” she explains. That is why the thali included firni, and fruit custard. “Firni is really the only sweet dish that Kashmiris know,” she says. “We had very limited sweets, perhaps because we didn’t use too much dairy.” The custard, meanwhile, is deeply domestic. “Whenever you wanted something sweet, my mother would just whip up a custard and add whatever fruits were left in the house. It’s really a home dessert.” The meal was accompanied by kahwa, a fragrant green tea infused with cardamom, cinnamon and almonds that Kashmiris drink throughout the day.
Food, Bamzai adds, is inseparable from ritual. Fish cooked with radish or lotus root appears during Shivratri; salted milk tea is reserved for specific wedding moments. “I don’t know why certain dishes are cooked on certain days. I was just told, ‘This is how it is.’” Even goshtaba, with Muslim origins, traditionally ends Kashmiri Pandit wedding feasts. This unexplored logic, she believes, is part of food’s enduring power.
Ultimately, the thali is an emotional statement. “There is another way of remembering,” Bamzai says, particularly in a time when loss is often weaponised. “You don’t have to nurture bitterness or hatred. Love is always better than hatred.”
At Chor Bizarre, that love arrived quietly—served collectively, grounded in memory, and meant to be shared.