Though you won’t starve, food will probably not be a highlight of your trip to Tibet. A few restaurants in Lhasa and some guesthouses in the countryside have begun to elevate a subsistence diet into the beginnings of a cuisine, but Tibetan food is usually more about survival than pleasure. On the plus side, fresh vegetables and packaged goods are now widely available and you are never far away from a good Chinese fànguǎn (饭馆) or cāntīng (餐厅) restaurant.
The basic Tibetan meal is tsampa, a kind of dough made with roasted-barley flour and yak butter mixed with water, tea or beer – something wet. Tibetans skilfully knead and mix the paste by hand into dough-like balls, which is not as easy as it looks! Tsampa with milk powder and sugar makes a pretty good porridge and is a fine trekking staple, but only a Tibetan can eat it every day and still look forward to the next meal.
Some common Tibetan dishes include momos and thugpa. Momos are small dumplings filled with yak meat or vegetables or both. They are normally steamed but can be fried and a few places serve cheese or potato versions. More common is thugpa, a noodle soup with meat or vegetables or both. Variations on the theme include hipthuk (squares of noodles and yak meat in a soup) and thenthuk (flat noodles). Glass noodles known as phing are also sometimes used.
The other main option is shemdre (sometimes called curried beef), a stew of potatoes and yak meat on a bed of rice. In smarter restaurants in Lhasa or Shigatse you can try dishes such as damje or shomday (butter-fried rice with raisins and yogurt), droma desi (wild ginseng with raisins, sugar, butter and rice) and shya vale (fried pancake-style pasties with a yak-meat filling). Formal Tibetan restaurants (sarkhang in Tibetan) in particular are very big on yak offal, with large sections of menus sumptuously detailing the various ways of serving up yak tongues, stomachs and lungs.
In rural areas and markets you might see strings of little white lumps drying in the sun that even the flies leave alone – this is dried yak cheese and it’s eaten like a boiled sweet. For the first half-hour it is like having a small rock in your mouth, but eventually it starts to soften up and taste like old, dried yak cheese.
Also popular among nomads is yak sha (dried yak jerky). It is normally cut into strips and left to dry on tent lines and is pretty chewy stuff.
Chinese restaurants can be found in every settlement in Tibet these days, but they’re around 50% more expensive than elsewhere in China.
Chinese food in Tibet is almost exclusively Sichuanese, the spiciest of China’s regional cuisines. One popular Sichuanese sauce is yúxiāng (鱼香), a spicy, piquant sauce of garlic, vinegar and chilli that is supposed to resemble the taste of fish (though it’s more like a sweet and tangy marinade). You’ll also taste huājiāo (花椒; Sichuan pepper), a curious mouth-numbing spice popular in Sichuanese food.
Outside Lhasa, few Chinese restaurants have menus in English, and when they do the prices are often marked up. We indicate restaurants with English menus by the English-menu icon. In most restaurants you can simply wander out into the kitchen and point to the vegetables and meats you want fried up, but you’ll miss out on many of the most interesting sauces and styles this way.
Chinese snacks are excellent and make for a fine light meal. The most common are shuǐjiǎo (ravioli-style dumplings), ordered by the bowl or weight (half a jin, or 250g, is enough for one person), and bāozi (thicker steamed dumplings), which are similar to momos and are normally ordered by the steamer – they’re a common breakfast food. Both are dipped in soy sauce, vinegar or chilli (or a mix of all). You can normally get a bowl of noodles anywhere for around ¥15; shāguō mǐxiàn is a particularly tasty form of rice noodles cooked in a clay pot. Chǎomiàn (fried noodles) and dàn chǎofàn (egg fried rice) are not as popular as in the West, but you can get them in many Chinese and backpacker restaurants.
You can get decent breakfasts of yogurt, muesli and toast at top-end hotels or Nepali restaurants in Lhasa, Gyantse and Shigatse, but elsewhere you are more likely to see Chinese-style dumplings, fried bread sticks (油条; yóutiáo) and tasteless rice porridge (稀饭; xīfàn). One good breakfast-type food that is widely available is scrambled eggs and tomato (fānqié chǎodàn).
The Muslim restaurants found in almost all urban centres in Tibet offer an interesting alternative to Chinese or Tibetan food. They are normally recognisable by a green flag hanging outside or Arabic script on the restaurant sign. Most chefs come from the Línxià area of Gānsù. The food is based on noodles, and, of course, there’s no pork.
Dishes worth trying include gānbànmiàn, a kind of stir-fried spaghetti bolognaise made with beef (or yak) and sometimes green peppers; and chǎomiànpiàn, fried noodle squares with meat and vegetables. Xīnjiāng bànmiàn (Xīnjiāng noodles) are similar, but the sauce comes in a separate bowl, to be poured over the noodles. It’s fun to go into the kitchen and see your noodles being handmade on the spot.
Muslim restaurants also offer good breads and excellent bā bǎo chá (eight treasure tea), which is made with dried raisins, plums and rock sugar, and only releases its true flavour after several cups.
Food in Nepali restaurants is a mixture of western and Indian-influenced tastes. Curries are generally the best option, from the various vegetable curries to creamy chicken butter masala or boneless chicken tikka. A ‘thali’ or ‘set’ generally comes with two curries, rice, dal (lentil curry), pickles and possibly yogurt. Yak steaks are popular, as are chicken sizzlers (chicken breast, potatoes and other vegetables and gravy served on a sizzling iron plate). The ever-popular lassi is a yogurt drink, either salty or sweet, often flavoured with mango or other fruit.
There will likely be a time somewhere on your trip when you’ll need to be self-sufficient, whether you’re staying overnight at a monastery or are caught between towns on an overland trip. Unless you have a stove, your main saviour will be instant noodles. Vegetables such as onions, carrots and bok choy (even seaweed and pickled vegetables) can save even the cheapest pack of noodles from culinary oblivion, as can a packet of mixed spices brought from home.
It’s a good idea to stock up on instant coffee, tea, oats, hot chocolate and dried soups, as flasks of boiling water are offered in every hotel and restaurant.
The local beverage that every traveller ends up trying at least once is yak-butter tea.
The more palatable alternative to yak-butter tea is sweet, milky tea. It is similar to the tea drunk in neighbouring Nepal or Pakistan and is generally served a thermos at a time. Soft drinks and mineral water are available everywhere.
Bö cha, literally ‘Tibetan tea’, is unlikely to be a highlight of your trip to Tibet. Made from yak butter mixed with salt, milk, soda, tea leaves and hot water all churned up in a wooden tube, the soupy mixture has more the consistency of bouillon than of tea (one traveller described it as ‘a cross between brewed old socks and sump oil’). When mixed with tsampa (roasted-barley flour) and yak butter it becomes the staple meal of most Tibetans, and you may well be offered it at monasteries, at people’s houses and even while waiting for a bus by the side of the road.
At most restaurants you mercifully have the option of drinking cha ngamo (sweet, milky tea), but there will be times when you just have to be polite and down a cupful of bö cha (without gagging). Most nomads think nothing of drinking up to 40 cups of the stuff a day. On the plus side it does replenish your body’s lost salts and prevents your lips from cracking. As one reader told us, ‘Personally, we like yak-butter tea, not so much for the taste as the view from the cup’.
Most distressing for those not sold on the delights of yak-butter tea is the fact that your cup will be refilled every time you take even the smallest sip, as a mark of the host’s respect. There’s a pragmatic reason for this as well: there’s only one thing worse than hot yak-butter tea – cold yak-butter tea.
The Tibetan home brew is known as chang (青稞酒; qingkējiǔ), a fermented-barley beer. It has a rich, fruity taste and most people seem to like it. Tibetan connoisseurs serve it out of a jerrycan, the dirtier the better. Sharing chang is a good way to get to know local people, if drunk in small quantities.
Those trekking in the Everest region should try the local variety (similar to Nepali tongba), which is served in a big pot. Hot water is poured into the fermenting barley and the liquid is drunk through a wooden straw – it is very good.
On our research trips we have never suffered any adverse effects from drinking copious amounts of chang. However, you should be aware that it is often made with contaminated water, and there is always some risk in drinking it.
The main brand of local beer is Lhasa Beer, now brewed in Lhasa in a joint venture with Carlsberg at the world’s highest brewery.
Supermarkets in Lhasa stock several types of Chinese red wine, including Shangri-La, produced in the Tibetan areas of northeastern Yúnnán using methods handed down by French missionaries at the beginning of the 19th century.