Afghan cuisine: Finding Kabul in the heart of Delhi

Delhi is no stranger to Afghan cuisine. Off-spring of the "medical tourism" boom between Kabul and New Delhi, Afghan restaurants in the city, starting with Kabul Delhi in Lajpat Nagar, where I discovered the joys of digging kebabs as they were meant to be (without the overpowering presence of garam masala), appear to be multiplying every month.

It really seems the moment a Max Healthcare Hospital comes up anywhere in the city, the business of Afghan restaurants registers a hefty spike. You have to see the restaurants proliferating at Hauz Rani, on the side that meanders beside Press Enclave Road in Saket, opposite Max Healthcare’s Super Specialty Hospital, to believe it. They are patronised by the families of patients who come daily from Afghanistan – and by Afghans who have decided to stay on after first coming to Delhi as refugees escaping three decades of self-destructive wars.

As I sat down with chef Mohammad Hashim from the Intercontinental Kabul, a hotel that has survived wars unleashed by the Soviets and the Americans and inquisitions by the Taliban, mental pictures of these neon-lit, rickety restaurants flooded my salivating mind. Hashim looks more like a Kashmiri Pandit, maybe because he doesn’t sport a beard, than the "Kabuliwala" as we have known him to be from Rabindranath Tagore’s story, first translated into English by Swami Vivekananda’s acolyte, Sister Nivedita (Margaret Noble), and then made into a film by Bimal Roy, with Balraj Sahni playing the title role.

You cannot have a subcontinental conversation without references to Hindi cinema. The chef, who’s here on a culinary exchange at the ITC Maurya initiated by Amar Sinha, India’s ambassador in Kabul, laughingly said how his friends back home said to him, “If you don’t meet Shah Rukh Khan, you needn’t come home!” SRK has been an presence in the lives of the Afghans – he’s the reason why the chef can speak fluently in Hindi. One of the signs of good times returning to Kabul is the proliferation of shops selling CDs of Bollywood films. The other giveaway is the housefull status of Intercontinental Kabul’s Bamiyan Brasseries, where the legacy of the Bamiyan Buddha, obliterated by the Taliban, lives on in a grand wall hanging. “Bamiyan,” Hashim says proudly, “is the Bukhara of Afghanistan.” As war recedes into a haze of memories and the Taliban seem like a bad dream, families are eating out more often. Women no longer are banned from restaurants, as they were during the days of the Taliban.

Your nose will guide you to ITC Maurya’s all-day dining restaurant, Pavilion, where the tandoor and the charcoal sigri haven’t seen a dull moment during dinner time since the day Hashim and his mates landed from Kabul. The Afghans believe in a minimally invasive style of cooking that lets us savour the natural flavours of the meats. They marinate their meats with salt, sometimes adding onions that double as tenderisers, cumin and coriander leaves; black pepper is an occasional add-on. Lamb is their favourite meat; in Delhi, it is goat meat and chicken all the way, yet Hashim and his team have adapted to the change seamlessly.

The adaptable Hashim, though, still cannot take the spice levels of our cuisine (and of course, the prices of dry fruits in the local market, plenty of which go into the Kabuli pulao). If Hashim’s chopan (a subtler version of the burrah), seekh (sexed up with nothing more than onions), jujeh kebabs (succulent chicken chunks on the bone) and chhabli (a cross between a chapli and to sil batte ki shaami) acquire their flavours from the juices of the meats, his chicken qurma has nothing more than to it than onions, green chillies, garlic and tomatoes. Still, you can’t stop dipping your Kabuli naan into it! More power to culinary diplomacy!