Food Trails - Flavours of Manali

Journeys fusing our love for road trips and food continue as the Food Trails series takes Dhruv Saxena up into the mountains with the Hyundai Alcazar for some great dining options in Manali

- Dhruv Saxena

The idea behind the Food Trails series is quite simple – combine the love for food and road trips into enriching journeys that showcase the depth of India’s culinary diversity. While the first part saw us head east from our base in Noida to Lucknow for Awadhi cuisine, we travelled west for the second part for the best Rajasthan has to offer and up north to Amritsar to dig into lip-smacking Punjabi food followed by a trip down to Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh for the city’s street food, followed by a road trip through Haryana for plus-sized servings of popular food items. For the latest installment, we journeyed into the mountains of Himachal Pradesh to discover food that should be on your list the next time you’re in Manali or passing through the hill station.

Reaching Manali from Delhi takes about 12 to 13 hours through Haryana, Punjab and eventually into Himachal Pradesh covering around 550km. That might be a bit much for some and with the condition of the tarmac once the road enters the mountains in bad shape, breaking the journey down with an overnight stop in, say, Chandigarh, might be the more comfortable option. One of the pain points along the route is the stretch of NH205A which you get on to after Ambala until Kharar, especially once the sun sets with blinding glare from oncoming traffic making overtaking slow-moving vehicles along the two-lane stretch quite a challenge.