Some of the best food I’ve ever eaten was handed to me on a wobbly plastic stool, at midnight, at the side of a highway in the middle of nowhere.
If you’ve driven the long roads across the north of India, you’ll know the places I mean. Dhabas, we call them — roadside kitchens that never really close, built for the lorry drivers who live half their lives behind a wheel. String beds out front. A radio going. A pot of something that’s been on the fire since before lunch, going darker and deeper by the hour.
Nobody at a dhaba measures anything. I once asked a cook how much chilli went into his lamb and he just laughed at me. He’d been making the same dish every day for thirty years. It was in his hands, not in a book.
What makes it
It’s lamb on the bone — a shank, ideally, the cut that rewards patience. Onions cooked down slowly until they nearly disappear. Mustard oil, whole spices, far too much black pepper, and time. That’s really the secret, if there is one: time. You can’t rush it and you can’t fake it. The meat has to give up on its own.
When we put it on the menu at Qissa, the temptation was to smarten it up. Take the bone out. Make it neat. We decided not to. It felt like it would be missing the point. So we left the bone in, kept the sauce dark and a little rough around the edges, and we send it out with extra bread because you are going to want it.
It’s not the tidiest plate we serve. It might be the most honest one.
Order it and get your hands involved. Tear the naan, chase the sauce, work the meat off the bone. Don’t wear a white shirt. And when you’re done, do what the drivers do — sit back for a minute before you move.
That’s the whole idea behind this place, really. Every dish came from somewhere, and somewhere is usually more interesting than a recipe card. This one came from a stranger at the side of a road who never knew he taught us anything.
— The Qissa kitchen