Some thoughts sharpen into focus only when one looks at a city through the prism of food. A while ago, I wrote about how Delhi’s culinary identity is less about authorship and more about stewardship, a city shaped by absorption, carrying the flavours, techniques and memories of those who arrived, settled and eventually called it home. Delhi remembers through recipes, but constantly reinvents itself through migration.
To ask what Delhi’s cuisine is, then, is to invite contradiction.
Is it the smoky kebabs and nihari of Shahjahanabad and Chitli Qabar? The morning comfort of bedmi poori and aloo sabzi, the post-Partition rise of chhole bhature, or mercantile kachori sabzi traditions? Is it the fleeting sweetness of Daulat ki Chaat in winter, Kayastha kitchens where Mughal refinement met domestic pragmatism, or Marwari vegetarian traditions shaped by thrift, trade and devotion? And where, in such a telling, do Majnu Ka Tila’s Tibetan kitchens fit, or Humayunpur, where foodways from Northeast India expanded Delhi’s palate through smoked meats, axone, bamboo shoot and home style cooking? What of Afghan bakeries in Lajpat Nagar, Bengali kitchens in Chittaranjan Park, South Indian canteens, or neighbourhood food cultures shaped by migration from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Kashmir and elsewhere?
Delhi, in many ways, is not one cuisine. It is many cuisines in conversation.
Which is why attempts to flatten culinary identity into singularity feel culturally incomplete.
Debates have emerged after the Uttar Pradesh government approved its “One District, One Cuisine” initiative, a culinary tourism and entrepreneurship scheme spotlighting 208 regional dishes. Yet the most striking omission is the absence of even a single meat dish from a culinary landscape long shaped by qormas, kebabs, nihari, kaliya, slow cooked meats and everyday non vegetarian food embedded in local histories and economies.
The concern here is not vegetarianism versus meat, nor whether one tradition deserves greater visibility. The discomfort lies elsewhere: what happens when representation begins to resemble selective memory? When cuisines shaped by geography, migration, caste, climate, labour and ritual are compressed into neat lists that privilege simplicity over complexity?
Cuisine, after all, is not merely a catalogue of dishes. It is labour, memory, inherited skill and social history. To erase a dish is often to erase the communities and practices around it.
These lists are rarely innocent. Once institutionalised, they shape tourism, aspiration and memory. They decide what gets celebrated, funded and photographed, and what slowly slips into invisibility.
Imagine if Delhi itself were reduced to one shorthand, if chhole bhature alone stood in for the city while kebabs, refugee kitchens, Tibetan broths, Northeastern foodways or Afghan grills disappeared from the narrative. The loss would not merely be gastronomic. It would be archival.
Food remains one of the last democratic records of coexistence. Recipes remember what borders forget. Markets preserve histories that textbooks flatten. Kitchens often tell stories of migration and belonging more honestly than speeches ever can.
Perhaps, then, the question is not whether such lists should exist. They can be useful and economically powerful. The question is whether any list, however exhaustive, can ever fully hold the complexity of a region’s culinary soul. In a country where food changes every few kilometres, reducing abundance into singularity risks becoming forgotten disguised as preservation.
