North India Culinary Journey: Delhi, Amritsar, Lucknow & Varanasi (9N/10D)

Description

This ten-day journey is for the serious food traveller. It moves across four cities that each represent a complete and distinct culinary school, from the Punjabi tandoor tradition of Amritsar to the refined Awadhi kitchens of Lucknow and the entirely vegetarian, temple-influenced cooking of Varanasi. Few itineraries in India offer this much culinary contrast within a single, logically routed trip.

Amritsar is where the Punjabi food known worldwide actually comes from, and eating it at source is a revelation. You explore the old city's kulcha, lassi and fish tikka institutions, several of which have operated for a century, and visit the Golden Temple's langar kitchen, which serves free vegetarian meals to as many as 100,000 people a day and remains one of the most extraordinary logistical and spiritual sights in the world. A dhaba trail on the road out of the city demonstrates where Punjab's roadside cooking tradition began.

Lucknow represents the other extreme: the Awadhi court cuisine developed under the Nawabs, where chefs competed to produce food of such delicacy that kebabs would dissolve on the tongue. You taste galouti kebab at its birthplace, watch the sealed dum pukht biryani technique, and take a hands-on session in kebab making and the use of Awadhi aromatics such as kewra, saffron and stone flower. The city's chikankari embroidery workshops and Nawabi architecture provide the cultural context.

Varanasi closes the journey on the Ganges. As India's oldest continuously inhabited city and a major pilgrimage centre, its cuisine is entirely vegetarian and profoundly traditional, built on kachori sabzi breakfasts, chaat, malaiyo winter foam and thandai. Dawn boat rides past the ghats and the evening Ganga Aarti frame a food culture that has changed remarkably little in centuries. The result is a North Indian culinary journey with genuine intellectual depth as well as excellent eating.