Pokhara’s Lakeside area is highly touristic and this means that there are a lot of restaurants, cafés and bars as well. Because Pepsi Cola in Kathmandu barely has any serious restaurants and because eating out here is a lot cheaper than in the Netherlands I decided to eat out regularly. I did have the possibility to eat with D.B. and Rekha who were paid by VSN to provide meals for me, but the cheap food here was too good of an opportunity to pass up.
To help other visitors of Lakeside and Pokhara to choose good restaurants to eat, I will give my recommendations in this blog post. First of all, even though Lakeside is a very touristic area it doesn’t mean that all restaurants are expensive. If you look for restaurants in the periphery of Lakeside you can find restaurants which charge prices equal to other restaurants elsewhere in Pokhara. Generally, these restaurants are recognized by their smaller size (smaller number of tables and seats) and their more basic exterior and interior.
Don’t concern yourself much with the restaurant recommendations of the Lonely Planet guide for Nepal. Some of their recommendations might be good, such as the Punjabi Restaurant, but the food served over there is not significantly better than at several cheaper restaurants where you can order the same dishes. A higher price doesn’t always equal more tasty food. For example, I ate pizza in Moondance and Caffe Concerto which are both recommended in Lonely Planet. In Moondance it cost me a bit more than 300 NPR probably, but the one I ordered at Caffe Concerto cost me almost 500 NPR.
I didn’t like them at all, they were boring and deep frozen pizzas from a Dutch supermarket would have tasted better. By contrast, a pizza Margherita I ordered at My Favorite Restaurant and Bar cost me 170 NPR and was delicious. But the reverse is also possible, for example a pizza Margherita at Lumbini (to the west of hotel New Winds) cost me 150 NPR, but it wasn’t topped with real tomatoes but with tomato sauce. It was baked in a gas oven and came out with the pizza bottom half charred, and it was probably one of the worst pizzas I ever ate.
Besides a few pizzas I ate Indian food most of the time because I like that most, but many restaurants here are a jack of all trades. Many restaurants serve both Indian, Nepali, Chinese, Continental and Italian food for example. At the restaurants which I’m recommending many main course dishes can be ordered for a cost between 100–200 NPR, so I could eat out two or even three times a day with my 500 NPR daily budget. To stay within my budget I had to restrict myself to just a main dish without any drinks on days when I ate out more than once though.
The restaurant in Lakeside which I like the most is My Favorite Restaurant and Bar, which in the far north of Lakeside near hotel Supriya. What makes this restaurant so good is that they offer an adequately fast free WiFi connection, they have a view on Phewa Tal and their price to quality ratio is very good. I ordered butter chicken here which came with rice and two chapatis included for 160 NPR. You can expect to pay to ten times as much, or € 16, in an average Indian restaurant in the Netherlands. A few days later the price was increased to 250 NPR though, not surprising because 160 NPR seemed far too cheap for them to make a reasonable profit, but still very well affordable of course. The chicken biryani for 180 NPR is good and as I already said, the pizza Margherita here is also great. The only disadvantage was the limited selection of vegetarian Indian dishes.
There are quite a few other small, cheap Indian restaurants and generic restaurants which serve Indian food which are probably worth recommending as well. There are simply too many restaurants to test, but there’s a specific place which deserves to be mentioned because some of them are clustered there. In southern Lakeside there’s a street meeting the central road running along Lakeside just east of Hotel Glacier. If you enter this street you can find a collection of six cheap restaurants close to each other. All seem to be interesting choices.
One of them is Sanju’s Restaurant, where I’d recommend the simple breakfast. It’s a Continental breakfast which includes tea or coffee (I like milk tea), two eggs prepared in any style, toasted white bread with jam or butter and hash brown potatoes for just 80 NPR. This simple breakfast features on almost every restaurant’s menu with exactly the same composition (why they copy each other in this regard is beyond me), so there aren’t many reasons not to order it at the cheapest restaurant. Just to the opposite of this restaurant is a restaurant called Kabab King which is also good.
The restaurants I have discussed so far have interesting menus, but their menus pale in comparison to what the New Marwadi Sewa Bhojnalaya restaurant has to offer. This restaurant is located in Mahendra Pul on the street going east from B.P. Chowk, on the northern side of the street. The locals seem to eat here a lot and given the location far away from Lakeside you’d expect significantly lower prices, but that is not the case when you compare to the cheap restaurants in Lakeside. The massive menu with exclusively vegetarian food which is mostly Indian certainly makes it worth a trip to Mahendra Pul.
Unfortunately their menu might be too elaborate for it’s own good, because the cook obviously doesn’t know how to make authentic, good Kashmiri pulao and Kashmiri naan. I noticed these items on the menu the first time I ate there and because I never ate these before I looked them up on the Internet to see what they were. Then I ordered them the second time I went there. The naan was not a naan with filling as described by various sources on the Internet, but a plain naan topped with banana, coriander and other stuff. The pulao was similar, it was topped with banana while the real dish uses dried fruit and lots of nuts. Better stick with the well-known Indian dishes because they are ‘safe’ choices; the samosas, palak paneer and jeera (cumin) rice were very nice.
None of these restaurants demand a 10% service charge which I despise so much, but I recommend one restaurant for which I allow myself to oversee this evil. It’s a Japanese restaurant called Momotarou which is at the front of hotel Mountain Villa. It was recommended to me by Luke, a Briton living in Japan who I wrote about earlier. It’s quite a lot cheaper than the other Japanese restaurant in central Lakeside which is called Koto, and you can order multiple dishes here without spending more than 500 NPR. The tendon dish which was recommended to me by Luke was quite good here, it consists of rice topped with tempura. The vegetarian options are a bit limited unfortunately.
However, the downside is that I really hate noodles, which are prominent in Japanese cuisine. I tried the tempura udon dish as well, a noodle soup topped withtTempura. I didn’t finish this dish, which I almost never do unless my dislike for the food is really serious. Just like Italian spaghetti and Tibetan thukpa noodle soup, the noodles had no taste at all and were inconvenient to eat because they are long and slippery. I don’t get why people like noodles. Disregarding the noodles, the food served here has sparked quite some interest in Japanese cuisine with me, because I’ve only visited a Japanese restaurant once back in the Netherlands. I might be buying a Japanese cookbook when I get back home.
There are also some Chinese restaurants in Lakeside with very large menus. I tried Lan Hua and the Chinese restaurant in Central Lakeside once, and respectively ordered mapo tofu and Kung Pao chicken there. Many Chinese tourists eat there so I thought they would be okay, but the mapo tofu was not as good as how I, having very little experience with preparing Chinese dishes, can prepare it at home. My version of it is vegetarian because I’m too lazy to add the meat, and I thought the minced meat which was included with the version served by the restaurant added nothing to the dish. The Kung Pao chicken was boring, not as good as when I ate it during my holiday in the USA almost a year ago.
Unfortunately I didn’t take the opportunity to taste the vegetable dishes, this is unfortunate because the Chinese restaurants I ate at in the Netherlands barely offer vegetarian dishes. I didn’t try China Garden because that’s more expensive than both of the other restaurants and seems to serve the same dishes. Lan Hua is my favorite and has good WiFi.
A restaurant which I frequent more for the WiFi than for the food is Sweet Memories in northern Lakeside, south of the Blue Heaven hotel. Some restaurants don’t have good, adequately fast WiFi which works all day long because of the power cuts, but this one apparently has a WiFi router running on a backup battery. Unfortunately the food isn’t so good. It’s better than Lumbini, but the mango lassi there was not good and sometimes it tasted really strange. The banana lassi had crudely blended large pieces of banana in it. The chicken biryani here, which has become one of my favorite dishes since I’ve encountered it in Nepal, was no good either.
One last restaurant I’d recommend is called Oh la la, which is located half way between Sweet Memories and My Favorite Restaurant. The vegetable biryani for 125 NPR here was brilliant, just as good as chicken biryani, and they serve good banana lassis for 55 NPR in really big glasses.
What I will certainly be going to prepare a lot when I get to the Netherlands are banana lassis. Back home I would prepare mango lassis occasionally, but only occasionally because mangoes are relatively expensive in the Netherlands and because it takes so much time to prepare them. They have a hard kernel in the center of them, so you have to cut around that to get the mango pulp which is inconvenient work. By contrast bananas can be peeled in seconds without any knife. I never heard about hash brown potatoes either, and will be making those as well when I get home.