Beyond the usual Indian plate
Ask most restaurants what an Independence Day menu looks like, and the answer is fairly predictable: a tricolour canapé, a biryani doing the work of national unity, kulfi to close. This year, two addresses on Mussoorie’s Mall Road made a different argument — that a food culture as regionally varied as India’s deserves a menu built from names most Indians outside the hills have never had to pronounce.
The Tavern has anchored Mussoorie’s Mall Road for more than four decades. A few doors along, Café de Tavern has a different appeal. This Independence Day, both stepped outside their usual menus to build a spread entirely around Uttarakhand’s indigenous ingredients — Bhatt, Jhangora, Gahat, Mandua, Pahadi Rai and Bhang, alongside herbs sourced locally from the hills - reinterpreted, the restaurants say, through a contemporary culinary lens, without losing what makes them specifically Pahadi.
What makes the idea worth paying attention is the origin of these ingredients. Bhatt, Jhangora, Gahat and Mandua have fed Uttarakhand’s hill households for generations, grown on terrain too steep and too cold for wheat and rice to reliably take. Mandua — finger millet, known elsewhere in India as ragi — gets ground into the dense, faintly nutty, iron-dark rotis that anchor a Pahadi thali.
Jhangora, a barnyard millet, goes the sweeter route, simmered slowly in milk and sugar into jhangore ki kheer, a dessert that turns up at almost every Kumaoni festival table. The legumes carry similar weight. Bhatt, a black soybean grown almost nowhere outside these hills, is roasted, ground and slow-cooked with mustard oil and garlic into bhatt ki churkani — a thick, nutty curry that’s arguably Garhwal’s most recognisable dish.
The bigger point The Tavern and Café de Tavern seem to be making has less to do with any single dish than with what an Independence Day menu was for.
Building a menu around Bhatt and Jhangora instead is a small, specific argument: that celebrating a nation whole means giving its lesser-known regional kitchens equal claim to the table, not just the ones that already travelled well.
It’s a modest gesture, contained to one high street in one hill station. But it’s also a fair question for any Independence Day menu to answer: independence from what, exactly, if not from a single idea of what Indian food is supposed to taste like?
