The Yellow Plate Road

Love Street Food? This Instagram Account Is All You Need to Follow

- Humaira Ansari

Dig into an Instagram account called My Yellow Plate, and instant hunger is guaranteed. Even if your last meal was minutes ago.

Wonder why? Well... picture these. *In the foreground is a yellow plate loaded with rajma-chawal. Raw, purple-rimmed onion rings sit on it. Far away, in Himachal’s postcard-pretty Kangra Valley, ant-sized parachutes float against the blue sky.

*Laping, a traditional cold-spicy Tibetan noodle dish, again in a yellow plate, is juxtaposed against a food stall in Delhi’s Majnu Ka Tila. The background is hazy but you can see the Tibetan stall owner, a woman in a pink kurta, dish out the next order.

*An Assamese thaali, transferred onto a yellow plate, at a dhaba in Nagaon bypass, looks straight out of a MasterChef kitchen—too manicured and pretty. In the centre of the plate sits a single fried puthi (a local fish) on top of plain white boiled rice. Circling it are tiny portions of some of Assam’s staple vegetarian dishes such as leseramah (black-eyed pea sabzi) and titekerela (bitter gourd sabzi). A blob of mint chutney makes the dish extremely Instagram-friendly.

These 248 snapshots of dishes from across India all served on a yellow plate, and juxtaposed against lush green fields, snowcapped mountains, and even dingy khaugallis—are what have made My Yellow Plate hugely popular. To give you a sense, the barely 18-month old account has 19,000 followers.

DISCOVERING THE LESSER-KNOWN