Kumaoni food: what to eat and where

A kitchen built on hill farming

Kumaon's food comes from terraced fields where wheat and rice grow beside millets and pulses that can cope with thin soil and uncertain rain. Finger millet, called mandua, and barnyard millet, called jhangora, were once the everyday grains of most villages. Black soybean (bhatt), horse gram (gahat) and a local red bean are the main pulses. Greens are gathered as much as grown, including stinging nettle in winter.

Cooking is simple and slow, often in heavy iron pots called kadhai, using mustard oil and a few spices. Two seasonings mark the food as Kumaoni: jakhiya, the small crunchy seeds of a wild plant that are fried in oil like cumin, and hemp seed, which is ground into chutneys and salts. Hemp seed used in cooking is a long-standing part of the hill diet and has no intoxicating effect.

Most hotels in Nainital serve standard North Indian menus. To eat Kumaoni food, look for small dhabas in Almora, Bageshwar and Munsiyari, ask your homestay, or ask a hotel kitchen a day ahead. Millet flour and pulses grown on the terraces are now also sold through co-operatives and shops in Almora and Haldwani, as city buyers rediscover grains that hill families once ate out of need rather than choice. Buying them gives the farmers who still grow these crops a reason to keep the terraces planted.

Dishes to order

These are everyday dishes you can find or request across the hive. Prices are indicative for 2026 in simple restaurants; homestays usually include them in meals.

town · 1,604 mAlmora and Kasar Devitown · 2,200 mMunsiyari

Everyday meals in a Kumaoni home

A homestay meal usually means rice, a dal or a pulse curry, a seasonal vegetable, roti and a sharp chutney or raita. In winter, expect gahat dal, which local families say keeps the body warm, and kaapa or saag made from spinach and other greens. Dubuk, a thick dish of ground pulses cooked with spices and eaten with rice, appears on cold evenings. Chainsoo is another, made from black gram roasted and ground before cooking, which gives it a deep, nutty taste.

Kumaoni raita deserves a special mention. Grated cucumber or pumpkin is mixed with curd, turmeric and ground mustard seed, then left to stand. The mustard gives it a sharp bite at the back of the nose that surprises visitors. Hill cucumbers in late summer are large and yellow-skinned and are the best for it.

On the side you will often get pisyu loon, salt ground on a stone with garlic, green chilli, coriander or hemp seed. It is used on cucumber, guava and fruit, and as a seasoning at the table. Every household grinds its own mix, and families often send a jar of it with relatives who have moved to the cities.

Sweets: bal mithai and singori

Almora is the home of two sweets that travellers carry back across India. Bal mithai is a dark brown fudge made by cooking khoya with sugar until it caramelises, then coating it in small white sugar balls. It was developed by sweet makers in Almora's Lal Bazaar in the early 20th century. Singori is fresh khoya sweet wrapped in a cone of maalu leaf, which gives it a faint green scent; it keeps only a day or two, so eat it in town.

Buy both by weight from established shops in Lal Bazaar rather than in boxes at highway stops. Bal mithai keeps for about a week to ten days in cool weather, which makes it a practical gift. Nainital, Ranikhet and Haldwani also have shops that sell it.

At festivals and weddings, families also make singal, a fried sweet of semolina and banana, and swal, crisp puris made for occasions.

Seasonal foods and what to buy

Kumaon's food changes sharply with the seasons, and the roadside is the best place to see it.

• March–April: buransh (rhododendron) flower squash, sold by local producers and self-help groups.
• May–June: kafal, wild red bayberries, sold in leaf cups by village children along the roads.
• June–August: apricots, plums, peaches and pears from Ramgarh and the Mukteshwar orchards.
• September–October: apples from the higher orchards, and fresh red rice and millets after harvest.
• November–February: nimbu saan, a winter snack of the large hill lemon mixed with curd, jaggery and hemp-seed salt, shared in the sun.
• All year: jams, chutneys and pickles from orchard villages and co-operatives; buy direct where you can.

Where to eat and how much to pay

In Almora, the dhabas near the bus stand and in the bazaar serve Kumaoni thalis for ₹150–250. In Munsiyari and Chaukori, homestays cook the most local food, often with vegetables from the family's own fields. In Nainital, eating Kumaoni food takes more effort: ask your hotel the day before, or look for small family restaurants away from the Mall.

Signature hotels such as The Kumaon at Kasar Devi and Mary Budden Estate in Binsar will usually cook Kumaoni dishes on request. Give the kitchen a day's notice and ask for local grains such as mandua or red rice if you want them.

Mountain kitchens cook with what reaches them by road. Out of season, and on landslide days, the menu shrinks. Vegetarian food is the norm in many homes and dhabas; meat dishes, often goat, appear in some restaurants and at festivals.

For drinks, tea is everywhere, sweet and milky, for ₹15–30 a glass at roadside stalls. Kausani has a tea estate on its slopes, a reminder that the British once planted tea across these hills. Buttermilk, called chhaach or mattha, is drunk with lunch in many homes, and buransh squash diluted with cold water is the region's best-known soft drink. In winter, ask a homestay for a glass of hot milk with turmeric or jaggery before bed.

Eating responsibly in the hills

Waste is a growing problem on Kumaon's roads, much of it from packaged snacks and bottles brought up from the plains. Choosing local food cuts this down and puts money straight into village kitchens.

Carry a refillable bottle and ask guesthouses for filtered water. Buy kafal and fruit in leaf cups rather than plastic bags. If you buy pickles or jams, ask for glass jars you can reuse. In homestays, eat what is cooked for the household where you can; asking for a separate menu means extra fuel and work in a kitchen where both are scarce.