Great news for fans of Taste Tibet! We are starting up a Saturday stall in Oxford's Gloucester Green market, beginning this weekend (04/03/17). We gave up our Saturday pitch two years ago, when our stall started to gain fame and we couldn't make enough momos! The problem is even worse now. But we've decided to run a kind of halfway house on Saturdays, rather than not running at all. We can't offer full portions of momos, but come for your curry fix, plus weekly specials, and we are offering one momo per main dish in the style of our Wednesday combos. Thus: The Saturday stall will hopefully give us an opportunity to see more of the lovely people we used to see for our Thursday night takeaways
Tibetan New Year takes place on February 28th this year. We will be celebrating with Tibetan friends at the weekend, and probably with momos and beer. But this is not traditional fare. While momos inevitably form part of the New Year's celebration in Tibet, the most traditional dishes that are prepared during Losar are enjoyed only at this time of year. Tibetan guthuk, the barley-based soup served every New Year's Eve, is one of these. Hugely symbolic, but always surprising, it provides the basis for most of the evening's fun. The guthuk, or "nine soup", must contain no fewer than nine ingredients, nine being an auspicious number in Tibet (odd numbers are perceived as lucky in general, and n
Those who have been lucky enough to visit Tibet have lots of questions of our chai tea at the Taste Tibet stall. Tibetan tea gets a bad rep. Tibet is most famous (notorious?) for its butter tea. This is made with bitter, black tea, churned with yak butter and sometimes salt. It is consumed several times a day, every day, by most Tibetan people. Butter tea is said to have considerable warming properties, as well as a high calorie count, both useful qualities at high altitude. Yak butter also helps to prevent and soothe chapped lips, a matter of course on Tibet’s windy, exposed steppes. I remember well smoothing yak butter over cracked skin back in the day. The unlucky visitor to Tibet does no
When Yeshi and I first met on a mountain path in the foothills of the Himalayas (every bit as romantic as it sounds) I tried out my best Chinese on him. I was hoping to impress. I was living in Beijing at the time. I had studied Chinese for my degree, and had been living in China for many years honing my skills with the locals, whilst editing the Oxford Dictionary of Chinese. Impressive, right? Not so to Yeshi. It turned out that his knowledge of Chinese was basic, to say the least, and that really the only thing we could converse about well in Mandarin was food. This is where Taste Tibet started, I guess. Historically, Tibetan people spoke Tibetan, a language mutually unintelligible from Ch
