There are a number of restaurants around South Manchester which claim a Nepalese heritage but, when you look at their menus, you do struggle to see any significant difference to your bog standard high street curry house. Namaste Nepal does at least have separate Nepalese sections in its list of both starters and main courses. Due to Covid, we’re not currently eating out so this meal was a home delivery via Deliveroo. The food had getting on for three miles to travel and arrived in decent condition. Mains went into the oven to fully warm through whilst we ate the starters (which had arrived still hottish).
I went down the Nepalese route. Momocha is probably the best known Nepalese dish. In this case, a generous portion of eight steamed dumplings filled with lamb – similar in texture to Chinese dim sum such as har kau. They were fine, if a bit claggy, and come with a very pokey dipping sauce. For a main course, bhotowan (with chicken) may or may not be a traditional Nepalese dish. Google only seems to find mention of it in a small handful of restaurants (all of them within a few miles of Namaste Nepal). It’s a dry dish, pretty much a chicken and veg stir-fry as you might find on a Chinese menu. Certainly nice enough with a pleasant, and not overpowering, run of chilli through it.
My life companion stuck to well known vegetarian dishes amongst the North Indian curry house dishes. Onion bhaji to start, which was fine. And a version of aloo gobi which was OK but no better than OK (the cauliflower was quite mushy). We shared good rice and an onion kulcha,
