Udaipur thali

no specific recommendations, but i just wanted to chime in and say that this is my biggest pet peeve about the guidebooks. they tend to focus on recommending "backpacker food" restaurants. i'm sure there will be a point where i'll have a craving for some pad thai or an omelet, but i eat enough of that stuff at home. when i'm in India, i want to eat as the Indians eat!

it's especially annoying as the restaurant section of any guidebook is the most likely to become outdated quickly -- which means that a paragraph about some Thai place in paharganj is kind of a waste of space, anyway. why not devote that section to advice about local specialties or particular neighborhoods to try certain things, even if no specific restaurant is mentioned?

Hi, Natraj Restaurant in Bapu Bazar is famous for Thali meal.

You know, I feel the same way. I can't believe they waste paper telling me where I can get great Greek food in India.

In my experience every country cooks their own cuisine better than any other so that's generally where the best tasting and cheapest food can be found.

Maybe chuck in one recommendation for soemthing other than Indian for those feeling homesick or wanting something more familiar, but pleeeaaaaze LP - if you are listening - give us good LOCAL food recommendations!

If you want to eat the real Indian food , can only recommend you a restaurant in Jaipur: the Royal Garden Restaurant, Kalwar Road, Jhotwara. It will never be in any guidebook I'm afraid, it's a restaurant visited by locals only and not located in the tourist areas. You may have a hard time finding it, but if you do, I'm sure you'll enjoy: great food, clean, reasonable prices (cheap), kind staff. Good luck!

I get the impression that lots of travellers get tired of curries after a while and long for an alternative occasionally. Sure i agree if you are only there for a few weeks or at the start of your travels, all the greek, pizza, etc, varieties would seem wrong. And then maybe LP thinks there's an indian rest every second shop and that most travellers would be capable of finding a place to eat.

But if you want LP to take note, then you should write your suggestion in the appropriate branch of TT because the mods don't sit around all day reading the threads for a job.

well sure, eventually you're going to have that craving for a regular eggs and toast breakfast every once in a while.

but in my copy Lonely Planet Italy (last big international trip), almost every recommendation is for Italian food. there are even sections on big local specialties you might not already know about, like artichokes in the old Jewish quarter of Rome, buffalo mozzarella in Campania, etc.

i've always had the suspicion that the LP India people just don't like Indian food. the tone taken about Indian food (and this is even in LP's book dedicated to Indian cuisine!) is more often warnings than praises, an assumption that tourists won't want to eat local food or will not like it in its traditional form, or even just an all around negative tone. it's something i've never encountered in other guidebooks. the information about what to eat and avoid in order to stay healthy tends to be unclear to the point of stupidity, leaving the average bumbling tourist to be afraid to eat anything at all for fear of erupting with dysentery.

they also stick to terminology like "curries", which is so incredibly wrong and misleading in terms of traditional indian food. if you walk into a dhaba and ask for a curry, will they even know what you're talking about? that's such a britishism; even US indian restaurants wouldn't get what you mean if you asked the waiter for "a curry". in fact, ALL the advice about food seems to come from a British perspective. I'm from South Louisiana (AKA "Cajun" country). I know from spicy food. I don't consider home cooked Indian food to be spicy AT ALL. In fact, my biggest problem when I visited the UK several years ago was finding food that actually tasted like something. Some of us non-brits actually like our food to have flavor. so when the "cuisine" section of my India guidebook is simply a mishmash of advice about how to get a restaurant to serve me appropriately bland food, and then guiding me to the only western restaurant in town (which is probably where i'm going to pick up that parasite they've tried to get me so afraid of) i kind of want to throw it at the wall.

or go write my own guide to indian cuisine for travelers. which is about what i'm tempted to do, and might be my project while i'm there.

opoponax - do it!
i'd def buy a copy! ive lived on european indian food for years and, about to make my first long-awaited trip to india i cant wait to tuck in to the real thing - pizza hut, mc donalds and any other western food are certainly not on my list!

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<hr>or go write my own guide to indian cuisine for travelers. which is about what i'm tempted to do, and might be my project while i'm there.<hr></blockquote>

Yes, do it. But a restaurant guide, not a food guide per se. Otherwise all we need do is buy a decent recipe book. Or you could do a restaurant guide website. I've seen one of these in Sydney. It looks great. Unfortunatley i am not in Sydney and so can't go and test it all out. But would love to. I hope i still have the link somewhere.

Opop, you sound like you might be an indian american. Is that so? Although i agree with you on the business of not having much interest in pizza restaurants etc in india, i don't agree with much else you write in the post above. Take the word curry. So its inaccurate. So what. We all know what it means. It means highly spiced indian "stew" that is usually eaten with rice. 'To me highly spiced does not mean hot, although i know that to many people spicy is the same as hot. To me highly spiced means, cooked with spices. I mean a curry is not tandoori chicken. Its a generic term that certain cultures find useful. If you find it derogatory, that's got to be some sort of projection because its not an insult when we use it. And i don't think any or at least the great majority of western stupids are that stupid to walk into an indian restaurant and ask for "a curry".

As to the health warnings. Not sure i have the energy to battle this one out, but to me the LP warnings read reasonably and they are applied to any country which has similar degree of undeveloped sanitation infrastructure (clean tap water, good sewage systems, food/health inspectors and strict food standards).

"We all know what it means. It means highly spiced indian "stew" that is usually eaten with rice."

not to be pedantic, but actually, no.

first off, people outside the british universe (irish, australian, etc) don't use the term, or at least not anywhere near what is meant when a brit/new zealander/etc. uses it. if you walked up to someone in California and asked where the best place for a curry was, they would send you to a thai restaurant. it may not be an insult, but it's reductionist and incorrect. and when Lonely Planet puts out a whole book about Indian cuisine and continues to use the term as if it had meaning, it's misleading and a little derogatory. what if the LP guide to Italian cuisine kept insisting that Italian food is all based on "noodles", and even tried to fit gnocchi and risotto into that framework?

most indian main courses i'm familiar with are not stews. they're mainly cooked vegetables and legumes/pulses. sometimes with a "wet" saucy consistency. sometimes less so (you just try and tell me mattar paneer and aloo gobi are "stews"). in the south, they are mainly eaten with rice (except when they're not). my roommate's punjabi family would never be caught dead including rice with a meal.

Oh, and no, i'm not desi. i just know my Indian food, mainly because i grew up with Indian-American friends in a part of the world lacking in Indian restaurants -- so i got to know various regions' home cooking before i ever had a "curry" set in front of me.