Himalayan Cuisine is our first Nepali restaurant, still one of only a handful in the country. The cuisine of Nepal is a hybrid of Tibetan, Chinese and Indian influences markedly different from its better-known counterpart in India. It also happens to be what you will eat in my home, as my wife is a native of that country.
The restaurant occupies a modest location that has already been home to a half dozen or so Indian restaurants during the seven years I have been in Las Vegas. The décor has a basic attractiveness, strewn with colorful paper prayer flags, and on the walls, thankas, or Tibetan cloth banners embroidered with Buddhist folklore and religious icons.
Himalayan Cuisine is the second restaurant of a family that already has one in Durango, Colorado, of all places, not such a far-fetched locale when one considers the mountainous terrain of Nepal, home to Mount Everest, Sherpas and the legendary yeti. The menu here is largely Indian, but if you squint, not too hard, you'll discover a dozen Nepali dishes for sampling, many of which are truly delicious.
So, just what is Nepali cuisine? I was afraid you'd ask.
First, Nepali dishes tend to be less oily than their North Indian counterparts, the spicing less aggressive. Nepalis eat lots of daal, or lentils in soupy gravy, which they pour over steamed rice in great quantity. Drink milk, and chances are that it is from the water buffalo. Go trekking in Nepal, the raison d'etre for 90 percent of the people who visit, and dalbaat, the name for rice and lentils mixed together, is standard trail fare, beyond the occasional chocolate bar and fried egg you can get in mountain villages.
Like all Vegas restaurants that represent the Indian subcontinent, this one has a buffet at lunch, and though it is a good deal, the food on it is more Indian than Nepali, probably by design, since it is more familiar that way. So I come here during the evening, when I can have the Nepali dishes I get a yen for, like chili chicken, momo and thukpa.
Momo, golf-ball-size steamed dumplings that come nine or 10 to an order, with a side of delicious tomato chutney, is easily Nepal's most popular dish with Western visitors. In Nepal, they are often stuffed with lamb, or "buff," the meat from the water buffalo. But in this restaurant, the chefs use ground turkey, a lighter, less fatty meat that, when spiced, is as good as the originals. (There are also momo for vegetarians, stuffed with a mixture of minced, spiced veggies.)
Thukpa is a thick Tibetan noodle soup, here available with vegetables, chicken or lamb, the way a real Tibetan eats it. It's a rich, cloudy soup, definitely filling and not for a diet. The same noodles are also used in chau chau, similar to Chinese chow mein except that a noseful of curry-like spices are added, along with the meat of choice.
In the menu's vegetarian section, look for alu dum, described as "delicious fried-potato curry." The description doesn't do justice to this dish, which is again distinctive of the cuisine of Nepal and very little like a dish you'd eat in an Indian restaurant. The potatoes are cut into small chunks, the so-called curry not powder at all but a mixture of mustard seeds, cumin and herbs.
Then there's chili chicken, which practically every restaurant in Nepal has on its menu. Picture chunks of boneless chicken, deep-fried to a golden crunch, in a dry, dusky sauce laced with fiery red chilies, onions and tomatoes. Even mixed with rice, this stuff would stop a mule in its tracks. No wonder my wife makes two separate pots of food, one for me and one for herself.
If I've given the Indian dishes here short shrift, I haven't meant to. In fact, most of them are the equal of, or superior to, those served in our strictly Indian restaurants. For instance, the pakoras—lentil-flour fritters made with shrimp, chicken or mixed vegetables—are light and greaseless, and the accompanying chutneys, mint or tamarind, are fresh and vivid.
Chicken tikka masala, chunks of boneless white-meat chicken in a spicy tomato-cream sauce (which is the No. 1 takeout dish in the U.K.), is also fine here, as are kawab lamb chops, marinated in yogurt and finished in a clay oven; and fish curry, made with flaky, fresh whitefish and a mildly penetrating sauce.
Nepali desserts don't much differ from Indian. There's khir, a creamy rice pudding laced with almonds and raisins, and carrot halwa, a bar-like confection made from milk, carrots, sugar and ground nuts. Wash everything down with lassi, a yogurt-based drink flavored with a choice of mango, cinnamon or banana.
My wife, for better or worse, says she's done cooking, for the time being.