Looking for ema datshi

or, Bhutanese food is heaven

For a while now, I’ve been craving Bhutanese food, specifically ema datshi. You could call it a cheese curry, but that’s only because we look for like when it comes to describing things, and all I can really say about ema datshi is that it’s not like anything else.

As with anything that’s a country’s national dish, there are multiple incarnations of this cheesy, goey stew; my erstwhile favorite inexpensive Bhutanese restaurant made theirs with chunks of potatoes and mushrooms and fat slivers of green that looked sneakily like bell peppers or green beans but were actually hot—very hot—chillis. Since that place sadly closed, I’ve been looking for a replacement, and a Google search turned up Ema Bhutanese Restaurant in Tinchuli Chowk, just near Boudhanath.

Cut to me, standing in a pristine, new-looking, empty dining room, quite sure I’d made a mistake in following the internet and driving all the way out here for this.

It was on the top floor of a hotel, and I was a thread away from heading right back down again, remembering the eating rules that I’ve mostly followed since moving to this part of the world: don’t look at cleanliness or a lack therof, look at people, or a lack thereof. If a place is full, especially with locals, it’ll be much safer than a clean-looking but empty restaurant. This follows the logic that a) a local crowd won’t return to a place that makes them ill, and b) the fuller it is, the less time food has to sit around and spoil; in an empty eatery, however clean, that food may have been sitting there for god knows how long so as to not be wasted.

It’s something I read in a Lonely Planet or similar guidebook years ago, and it’s simple but it’s stuck and generally served me well. There have been, however, notable exceptions to the rule, and since I had driven well out of my way to get to this particular restaurant, I was really hoping this would be one of them. Despite misgivings I chose a table, ordered, and resigned myself to a potentially awkward meal.

A few minutes later, washing my hands in the bathroom, a pleasant young woman asked me where I was from. She was Bhutanese, it turned out, ran the hotel and restaurant with her Nepali husband, and we had a happy chat about food. Instead of the empty dining room, she suggested the bright, covered rooftop, showing me the masks on the walls that she’d brought from Bhutan (“You should Google that one,” she said—see below, and I will let you do that if you want to) and excused herself to head for the kitchen.

I breathed an internal sigh of relief. It’s good to break your own rules sometimes. Someone as enthusiastic as she was about her country’s food being in charge of the kitchen boded well for the meal ahead. As if in confirmation, as I gathered my things to move upstairs, I saw waiters running to lower floors with full dishes, and was told most of the food orders came from hotel guests below. So: a busy kitchen despite an abandoned dining room!

I’m far from being any kind of Bhutanese food expert, in fact, going through the menu I realized it had been so long since I’d eaten any that I really only recongized ema datshi; as the place I used to eat it also served Tibetan food, the rest of my usual order usually skewed more that way.

The menu at this new place was delightfully specific, and I was saved from further wondering by the set meals. The meat dishes were tempting, but I knew what I came for and went for the ema datshi set, especially as the rest of the menu was a bit of a mystery to me.

When my meal arrived, I knew I’d made the right choice—and I was happy to see that except for the ema datshi itself, the other dishes all were new to me: so from left to right above here we go:

Spinach and dried red chillis float in a milky soup, so mild as to be almost flavorless except when paired with the other dishes, where it became complimentary.

The erma dhatse, of course, the star of the show: this incarnation didn’t seem to have mushrooms but it did have slices of orange bell pepper as well as green chilli. The sauce, despite what it looks like, is completely unlike a bechamel-style white sauce in both texture and taste and one day I want to learn how that’s achieved. It’s smooth and flavorful, not heavily spiced—the heat comes from the chilli, and your palate bounces back and forth between rich creaminess and intense heat. It’s delightful. I love it with the ting momo, a steamed bun, though it’s also eaten with rice.

Then there’s a sort of pickle, the most surprising, with ingredients I couldn’t quite place and a funky-fermented taste. The sort of thing you think you don’t like at first and then keep going back for.

A crunchy cucumber salad rich with ground sesame seeds, bright from fresh onions and danya (coriander/cilantro) and oh so spicy—presumably more of those green chillis.

Finally tasty greens of an indeterminate sort, and a glass of very very lightly sweetened yoghurt drink, not quite as smooth as a lassi. Not sure if it was meant to be desert or a tool to temper the heat, and I used it as a bit of both.

Delicious food on a rooftop full of winter sun, a little wind, three of the four sides open to the view: Himalayas to my right, hilltop monasteries with gilttering rooftops, to the left the giant hump of Boudha stupa, an island in a sea of houses topped by water tanks, drying laundry and prayer flags fluttering every way you look.

**

The serving and eating dishes were all wooden, and heading home I saw a small shop, shelves packed with wooden receptacles of all shapes and kinds. I love that after so many years, there are always new things, unknowns: this time a vessel made up of two flat wooden bowls that fit together tightly to form a sort of container—the sahuni or proprietress said it was for carrying food, and it certainly fit together tightly enough to hold most anything but soup, like a wooden tiffin or bento box. I wasn’t planning to buy anything, but it was beautiful and affordable and it came home with me, where it now sits in my kitchen wondering whether it’s to be decorative or useful.

And I’m already planning another visit to keep working my way through the menu…