Fine Dining at the Last Frontier – A Journey to India's Most Unique Restaurant
Updated: Dec 7, 2024
Yes, I will travel for food.
Especially if it is a one-of-its-kind heritage restaurant nestled in a remote valley in the Eastern Himalayas, flung far beyond the tourist trail.
When I heard about Damu's Heritage Dine, my curiosity could not be contained, and so this food quest took me into the rugged mountains of Arunachal Pradesh – a state in India's extreme Northeast and the last frontier before the Tibetan border.
This area is so offbeat, it was only after I arrived to friendly yet baffled faces did I realise that I was the first Westerner ever to visit this village in the Chug Valley and its new project, Damu's Heritage Dine; a destination restaurant run by eight industrious Monpa women.
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Damu means daughter in Duhumbi, the local language, and the team at Damu's Heritage Dine is formed of eight women from the village's all-female self-help group.
The Monpa are the local tribe of this area of Arunachal Pradesh, Monpa literally means “the land under Tibet”, and they are historically nomadic farmers whose communities rely on a barter system. They don bright blue gum boots and pyjama-style clothes during working hours and change into their distinctive red dress for special occasions. Upon entering the village I noticed immediately how everyone looked healthy and strong, with ruddy cheeks and silky black hair.
The Monpa share this habitat with a huge amount of wildlife, notably both the Red Panda and the Snow Leopard, which believe it or not, is partly why Damu's Heritage Dine came to be. When the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF India) started taking notice of this area and its endangered species, they reached out to nine villages in West Kameng, including Chug.
They started a Community Conserved Area project (CCA), and their goal was to guide the Monpa into protecting their environment, its wildlife, and in turn their culture and cuisine. A sustainable tourism initiative was implemented to preserve their traditional architecture, which was slowly eroding, and to revive this area's culinary heritage. And so earlier in 2024, Damu's Heritage Dine was born.
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The Monpa traditionally grow hardy crops like millet, corn, and barley, and they rear yaks and forage edible plants. This has produced a rich culinary tradition, made up of heirloom grains, wild plants, and sustainable milk and meat products, usually preserved, fermented, smoked, or boiled.
One of the intentions of Damu's was to preserve these culinary traditions and curate a menu based on this ancient knowledge. A professional chef from Assam was brought in to guide these daughters of Chug to create a seven-course seasonal tasting menu, using ingredients only grown or foraged in the village.
The menu consists of some traditional recipes the ladies were already familiar with but had never written down, as well as other more contemporary menu items the team learned how to make.
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After hearing about this unique restaurant I couldn't help but follow my tastebuds to the far Northeast. I started my journey in Guwahati in Assam, where I had to procure a permit ahead of time to enter Arunachal Pradesh, due to its proximity to the disputed border with China-administered Tibet.
As a solo traveller, you are only allowed to visit certain parts of the state, and luckily for me, Chug Valley falls under the jurisdiction of the Dirang/Tawang circuit so I was allowed to go. After submitting all of the necessary documents I waited for six days for my permit to arrive, where I then jumped on an Assam State bus to Tezpur, a town close to the Assam/Arunachal Border. After a night of RnR at the brilliant Deka's Homestay in Tezpur, I took a Sumo to Dirang.
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A Sumo is a shared taxi, 4x4 style – the only vehicle that can handle the rubbly winding roads of Arunachal. They are crammed with people and are not by any means comfortable, nor do they have seatbelts. I must admit my hair was standing on end when we were hurtling around the hairpin cliff-edge roads, where we passed several recent landslide sites, my visit being in October at the end of the rainy season.
At the border, I had to check in to the foreigners office, whilst my weary fellow passengers tapped their feet and huffed outside at the checkpoint waiting to get on the road. I was dealt with very cordially by the military, they even fetched me from the Sumo and escorted me to their office under an umbrella. Around 30 minutes later after all of my documents were checked we were off again, with the assurance from me that I would check in to the police station in every town where I spent the night.
A mere seven bumpy hours we reached Dirang, where I called my contact at Cosmos Homestay (+917629843799) to come and collect me. I was very glad to be driving away from the noisy, concrete-mess roadside town of Dirang, deep into the green rolling hills and meadows filled with pink cosmos flowers, my homestay's namesake. (There are a few homestays in Chug, none have wifi, and Cosmos is the only one with a signal for mobile data)
My host, Dorji, is part of the team at Damu's, and with very little English we communicated with Google Translate and plenty of miming. Cosmos is her family home, and I immediately felt welcome by this stout and capable woman with pink cheeks and a big grin. Dorji is a hard-working community leader and is involved with all of the village projects.
I had made my travel plans in the Chug Valley through the local guide, Leike (+919774515569), and that evening she swung by to see me and explain the agenda for the next day. I would be heading to Damu's early to watch the food prep, have lunch, and then afterwards take a trek around the village.
The village itself is very cute, and to my knowledge, the one road running through it is quite new. Pretty much everyone here works their land and then trades crops, but now with the introduction of Damu's Heritage Dine, other small ventures are popping up, like a handful of homestays, the paper-making workshop, guided trekking trails, and a small handicrafts shop.
Leike allocated me a local guide for the following day, RC, I assume because he also has a little bit of English. He swaggered up to my homestay chomping on fresh persimmons and a raw cob or corn, complete with the baby blue welly boots that everyone wears here. RC walked the 2km trail through the flower meadows with me to Damu's, where the restaurant is perched on the hillside in a century-old traditional house overlooking the village.
I watched the team work in the kitchen, kneading millet dough and sizzling chicken on the open fire for their new menu item – tacos! They worked on the floor, pounding dough and deftly rolling momos with skill and speed, while their kids played with one of the village cats outside – who was tolerating being dragged to and fro with great patience, as he knew if he stuck around his reward would be these tourist's lunch scraps.
Let's eat.
We climbed up a ladder to the second floor of the traditional Monpa home and sat on coloured floor cushions, awaiting the first of our seven courses. I was dining with a journalist from Mumbai and a tourist from Delhi. The cosy restaurant has space for eleven diners, so reservations are often communal at Damu's.
The ladies changed into their traditional maroon shinkas to serve us lunch. The first course was buttery churra gombu served on a bed of hot coals, a signature dish of theirs. It is a maize tart that tastes similar to Colombian arepas, but these are with oleoresins and slowly roasted with yak ghee.
The oleoresin is from the Chinese lacquer tree, from a sap which causes allergic reactions. Today, only one person in the village can extract it without breaking into hives, he is Dorji's cousin and the skill was passed down by his family.
This was followed by cold buckwheat noodles which were delicious and one of my favourites. Then we had the seasonal salad, made up of refreshing cucumber, orange, butter bean and popcorn.
Next came millet momos stuffed with fermented yak cheese and greens, followed by creamy pumpkin and glass noodle soup, then chicken tacos with rajma and local herbs and chilli chutney, and finally my ultimate favourite – a chicken and ginger clear soup served with red rice.
Sweets were plentiful, starting with delicious pancakes spread with homemade apple jam, and the menu rounded off with dressi; sweet red rice fried in yak ghee with crushed walnuts and jaggery.
English is not widely spoken in the village, but luckily my Hindi-speaking journalist dining companion translated all of the food presentations for me. I said yes please to a digestif, the local brew, a fermented rice drink not too different to Saké and served warm.
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During my visit to the Chug Valley, I was lucky to actually meet a WWF representative who explained a bit more about Damu's, and he said when the chef came from Assam to help them curate a menu, for these daughters of the village, preparing the dishes came naturally. They are from a generation that foraged for all of their food, way before processed and packaged goods reached these remote lands.
Not only that, but the Monpa ladies surpassed all the expectations of the village men, who when presented with the idea at a village meeting, did not think the women were capable of running a restaurant. Well, I can tell you first-hand, they are... and it is a bloody good one. Now THAT is girl power!
Damu's Heritage Dine is an immensely special project, and most of the dishes I was served were brand new flavours to me. I have worked in fine dining for my whole life, so finding new tastes that surprise me does not happen very often.
I also actually liked that the service was not fine-tuned or pretentious as is with many 'fine-dining' establishments, I was happy to be part of their humble world and do things the way they do.
All in all, I think Damu's Heritage Dine has the potential to become a restaurant of world renown, it is certainly unique enough for it.
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Happy Travels
xx
What a lovely, unique experience! It took some doing to get there but that's part of the fun. Thank you for sharing this and your accompanying photos.