Ladakh’s newest café-cum-gallery offers a taste of the local

There is a new dining destination in Ladakh and it doubles-up as an exhibition place. The two-month-old Camp Kharu houses a 30-seater café with a gallery area and is spread over two floors with breath-taking views of the Zanskar valley. It is run by a local self-help group, Gafhel Tsogspa, comprising six women between the ages of 33-55 years.

The menu has an array of Ladakhi dishes. There is a range of breads—khambir, a breakfast staple is traditionally baked over an open fire atop a slate called doslang, and is often served with dried apricots soaked in water; temok or tingmo is steamed Tibetan bread, eaten with dal and vegetables; and paba is typically made with buckwheat flour. They serve Ladakhi mokmok or momos which are steamed dumplings with a stuffing of meats and vegetables. The mains have a variety of traditional pastas and noodles. There are heartwarming bowls of thenthuk, a noodle soup with wheat flour, local peas, fresh or dried vegetables topped with the dried cheese, churpi. Chhutagi is bow-tie shaped Ladakhi pasta made with wheat-flour, boiled with root vegetables and is served as a soup. There’s the soulful preparation skyu, a rustic stew of potatoes, turnips, carrots, and ‘thumbprint’ pasta made from buckwheat or wheat dough. It is cooked with milk as a hero ingredient. 

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End the meal with a warm cup of butter tea known as cha khante or gurgur cha. A favourite of Tibetan monks, the tea leaves are steeped in boiling water with salt, khakla mar (homemade butter) and milk is occasionally added. They are churned together in a traditional vessel known as dongmo. While the tea is perfectly good on its own, it can be enjoyed with tagi pulli or cookies made with wheat flour, oil, milk and baking soda with a hint of sugar and salt. They are the perfect alternative to packaged biscuits. Then there’s kholak, a breakfast dish where roasted barley is ground and mixed with dollops of ghee. Kneaded to a firm consistency, it is carefully shaped into oval discs between palms. Phemar, which uses almost the same ingredients as kholak combines ground barley flour, sugar, butter tea and native yak cheese shavings, and is served as a thick porridge.

The backstory

Located strategically along the Leh-Manali highway (NH3), barely an hour away from Leh city, Camp Kharu is situated in Karu village’s main market. The café-cum-gallery has pay-and-use toilets with an interesting backstory. Originally a derelict, dilapidated, and rundown toilet, the place was handed over to Royal Enfield by Leh's Rural Development Authority last year. It was given a facelift through the bike company’s collaboration with Sandeep Bogadhi, founder, Earthling Ladakh, a design-focussed practice in Nubra Valley. It is a corporate social responsibility initiative with an investment of roughly ₹ 3 crores, and the official name is Royal Enfield's Camp Kharu. Bogadhi designed it using rammed earth construction, an ancient construction technique that involves combining a mixture of things such as clay, sand and gravel to create strong, durable walls. It is a vernacular architectural method used in Ladakhi homes to ensure a low carbon footprint.

Learning basics

Training at Food Craft Institute in Leh, the six employees of Camp Kharu, who were used to baking with traditional materials such as stone and iron griddles started educating themselves in modern kitchen appliances like ovens, microwaves and coffee machines. Additionally, mentorship programmes with renowned chefs, such as Prateek Sadhu and Jigmet Mingyur, gave them insight into recipe building and cooking techniques. 

They learnt to bake different tea cakes such as chocolate, banana and dry fruit cakes to go with drinks like cappuccino and cold coffee. Besides food presentation and plating techniques, local herbs, plants, and edible flowers are now used in the café for chutneys and other condiments. Mingyur also broke myths. For instance, in some local pasta dishes, such as skyu, many Ladakhis use tomatoes. Originally, though, the dish doesn't have this ingredient. The initiative has empowered the women too. Each of them earns ₹10,000 per month (tips excluded), to remain self-reliant and financially independent.

Documenting Ladakhi kitchens

Camp Kharu’s launch in mid June coincided with ‘Ladakhi Kitchen’, an exhibition by Tsering Motup Siddho, an award-winning multidisciplinary artist from Leh. Siddho’s work, as seen on the day of the launch on June 11,  included photographs of dishes along with recipes and utensils, all of them curated for an in-depth understanding of traditional Ladakhi kitchens. This was showcased in the exhibition area on the ground floor at Camp Kharu. 

“Some of the recipes, if not documented now, will be lost forever,” says Siddho. Urging us to sit on the carpets on the ground floor of Camp Kharu, Siddho invited us to make momos. He had the utensils, steamer and dough, and kept us hooked with stories of how he used to sit on the kitchen floor with his grandmother and made momos with her. Siddho examines the link between memories and food while documenting lost recipes of Ladakh. Visitors can still look at his exhibition of photographs and leave a recipe of their own if they wish on blank postcards that can be asked on request. The exhibition is on for a few more months. 

With the younger population moving out of villages in Ladakh, Siddho’s exhibition gives a comprehensive understanding of the region’s culinary traditions and cultural practices. He’s also exploring the lineage of metal workers in the Ladakhi village of Chilling who produce kitchen and other daily life objects with traditional styles and processes such as tipril (Ladakhi tea pots), dongmo (cylindrical wooden utensil with metal motifs for butter tea preparation), and doltuk (black stone pots for soups, pulao and stews).

The next time you’re in the region, take a break in Camp Kharu with a cup of hot butter tea paired with tagi pulli (Ladakhi cookies), or dig into a bowl of thenthuk while gazing at the mystifying views of the river Indus and the Zanskar range. Then spend some time in the gallery area to soak in the work of contemporary Ladakhi artists.

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Abhilasha Ojha is a Delhi-based art and culture writer.