It appears I’ve turned a corner in my experiences with bikes on the local rideshare app, Pathao. I was a slow adopter, and the few times I tried it, managed to disproportionately score either motorbikes that really needed a good servicing, daredevil drivers, or those so new to the city they didn’t quite know where they were going. Sometimes I was the one who didn’t know where I was going.
The last few times, though—it’s been good, and this evening I took a bike across town. It was just as the sun was going down, a bad time for traffic, but the perfect time for a drive. The Dharahara Tower and the trees circling Ratna Park seemed to be glowing, backlit by the evening light, and as we crossed the bridge over the Bagmati River into Lalitpur, the last bits of of pink and orange were hugging the tops of the hills off to the right beyond the water, while above the sky turned a deep, dark blue. It was properly night by the time I reached my destination, and had such a competent driver I was able to relax and enjoy the ride.
It felt like I’d traveled along the sunset.
Just before reaching my destination, I spotted an interesting looking momo place from the back of the bike, so once I was done with the event I’d come for, I headed back to Aambo Momo, festooned with an adorable cartoon momo licking its lips as it holds up cutlery, and the tag line Fuel for Nepali SOULS.
How could I not try it?
At the counter I ordered a plate of pork momos, which I don’t eat often. The best I’ve ever had were at a tiny eatery attached to a wholesale liquour store near a place I once lived, up north in Golfutar. They’ve been closed for years, but they were made to order and had the thinnest skin and she served them with a fresh-roasted hand-beaten tomato-chili achar and I still think about them more often than you’d expect. I also enjoyed the pork momo at New Dish, in New Road. There was still a restaurant there when I visited a year or two ago after a long gap, but the name had changed and alas so had the momos, in a way that was hard to pin down but very definite.
Back in the present, It’ll take ten minutes, they told me. Clearly chicken and veg are the ones they keep the steamer filled with, as those were flying out to tables all around me. I wasn’t in any hurry, so I did my crossword and watched people around me talk business and enjoy time with their families and friends and eat their momos and leave, only for the tables to quickly fill up again. I loved the wood and cheerful-blue painted window and door frames.
When I was called to collect my order at the counter, I was also given a platter with three different sauces. Or rather two sauces and a dryish chili concoction. “Those are spicy, and the middle one is a peanut sauce.” These were momos worth waiting for: not as thin-skinned as the ones that I still remember from those places all these years later, but delicate in a way that I like my pork momos to be. The peanut sauce wasn’t terribly heavy on the peanuts, more’s the pity, but it was very good, especially when used together with the tasty tomato-based one, which was gently spicy. I decided to pass on lethal-looking red mix you can see there on the upper left for today, but a woman at the table next to me sprinkled it all over her serving, and it did look good, but… not today. I only wish they had real cutlery—the small plastic forks provided felt like an unnecessary use of disposable plastic (though they did use leaf plates!) but are also very much not ideal for eating momos with, unless the goal was to get customers to not eat their delicious sauces by the spoonful. So annoying to eat with but yet the momos are solid and apparently there’s a branch on my side of town and how weird do you think it would be if I showed up with my own cutlery?