The apricot trees bend low, heavy with fruit, their shadows dappling the tables beneath. From the orchard, laughter drifts with the wind, mingling with the clink of glasses that carry stories older than any recipe. We are at Dolkhar in Leh, tucked into Tukcha in the heart of town, a place once alive with the caravans of the Silk Route. At Tsas, Dolkhar’s restaurant, apple trees soften the light over the dining room, and the garden’s ethos shapes everything that comes to the table.
Ladakh’s food traditions rarely get the spotlight. Beyond the cliché of “meat alone sustains,” lies a pantry of treasures. Beneath the perception of a barren, harsh landscape, there’s seasonal produce, wild herbs, foraged ingredients and grains that have quietly nourished generations.
Take, for instance, barley, the grain that feeds, fortifies, and sanctifies. It thickens the gur gur cha sipped in monasteries at dawn, it ferments into chang and arak that flow freely during community celebrations.
“When I conceptualised Tsas, the underlying idea was to build a food culture that could revive Ladakh’s traditions while adapting them to today’s contexts,” says Rigzin Lachic as the sun dials the orchard into gold. She speaks not just as the founder of Dolkhar, a boutique property built in conversation with its landscape, but as someone who returned to Leh in 2017 after years away to find her home at a crossroads.
Tourism was booming, imported foods were displacing the local, and the agrarian rhythm that had long sustained Ladakh was faltering. The tsas, kitchen gardens that once anchored every home were vanishing. “Our deep knowledge of seasonality, preservation, and community nourishment was slipping away. Tsas was a way to reweave that tapestry.
Dolkhar itself began as a response to that shift, an experiment in how hospitality could imagine Ladakh’s future without untethering it from its past. Tsas grew from the same intent.
At 3,500 metres, the extremes of Ladakh’s short summers and long winters dictate the kitchen’s vocabulary. At this altitude, even the act of cooking bends to the mountains—water refuses to boil as fiercely, stews linger in their own time, and dough finds new moods. Meals are a reminder that patience is a part of living with the land.
Barley and buckwheat are softened through slow soaking. Wild garlic, nettles, and seabuckthorn are gathered from the slopes. Rhubarb and stinging nettle are used to create bitters, jams, and broths. “We go with what the land offers us, not with what’s trending globally,” says Lachic. “The way ingredients are shortlisted for the menu begins with seasonality, depending on the logistics of how much we can forage in a given season and how accessible certain produce is, whether gathered from the wild or sourced from local farmers.”
Global culinary conversations about fermentation and low-intervention cooking are observed, but not mimicked. Instead, they serve as scaffolding to deepen Ladakh’s own practices. There is a deliberate challenge to the mountain cliché that meat alone sustains. “What often goes unnoticed is that, beneath the perception of a barren, harsh landscape, Ladakh offers its own treasure box of seasonal produce, foraged herbs, and ingredients that have long sustained its people in quiet, resourceful ways. We wanted to bring that to the forefront, to highlight what has always been there but rarely celebrated. Beneath the perception of barrenness lies abundance. Our job is to make it visible again.”
Her team also travels across Ladakh, tracing variations in cuisine and gathering knowledge of ingredients particular to each region, which they weave back into the table at Tsas. To understand Tsas, you have to leave the dining room and walk into the mountains. That’s why, when Lachic wanted to expand the restaurant’s bar program, she invited not just a bartender but a storyteller, Yangdup Lama, India’s most celebrated mixologist. The collaboration with The Brook, Lama’s Delhi bar, inspired by the mountains, became an invitation to let Ladakh’s landscape pour itself into the glass.
Lama didn’t hesitate. “On the very first phone call, I didn’t even ask what the collab was about, I just said yes, we’ll just do it,” he laughs. “Purely because The Brook is a mountain-inspired bar, and Tsas and Dolkhar have such a great philosophy of bringing the Ladakhi way of life, the ingredients and the artisans together in this setting.”
Over the days that followed, we followed Lachic and Lama’s teams as they attended morning prayers in a monastery, added spoonfuls of roasted barley to their butter tea, tasted chang straight from the village, walked barley fields, and crushed herbs in their palms. “Meeting the people who grow the ingredients, looking at their way of life and getting a first-hand experience, only helps to enhance the cocktail process,” Lama says.
On a surprisingly sunny morning after the region had a week of heavy rain, we made our way to Khatpoo, a remote village of just eleven families. On the way, Lachic points at capers and seabuckthorn growing in the wild. At Khatpoo, Nilza, who is part of Lachic’s team at Dolkhar, takes us to her ancestral home. Her mother, Thinles Angmo, is the elected head of her village and the neighbouring Hemya village as well. She explains how every home once had two kitchens, one for summer and one for winter, each the heart of family life and celebration.
We walk down the slopes in the village to see wild leeks, nettles, wild roses and horsemint. While we have noticed many of these ingredients on the menu at Tsas, some of them will now find a place in Lama’s cocktails. Lama’s eyes light up at the mint: “The mint was a complete standout for me. I’ve tasted many varieties in all these years, but this one is more bitter and has lovely pepper notes, and what better than to use a gin and combine the gin to make something really interesting.”
For breakfast, Angmo serves khambir, Ladakh’s dense, rustic bread. At Tsas, it appears in a lighter form. “We make it thinner for easier consumption, while keeping the recipe and techniques true to tradition. We don’t aim to replicate traditional dishes exactly as they are made at home. Instead, we focus on the ingredients themselves and give the dishes new forms. In this way, the emphasis remains on the ingredients and the knowledge behind them, while opening Ladakhi food to contemporary interpretation.”
Khambir is paired with endless cups of butter tea, poured the instant your cup empties. Lama confesses he has always dreamed of translating butter tea into a cocktail. Days later, he cracks it—with whisky and yak cheese. Angmo shows us the alchemy of chang, a barley-based drink made by boiling, cooling, folding it with yeast, and burying it in hay to ferment into a cloudy, tart beverage. It’s delicious, the Chang, and seems deceptively mild.
When it is distilled and transformed into a clear spirit called arak, it becomes significantly more potent. These traditional drinks, too, eventually find new expression as Lama reimagines them. What unfolded was less a bar menu and more a bridge between cultures, ingredients, and the timeless rhythm of the mountains.
Another ingredient that catches Lama’s fancy is Syah, or wild rose. “I underestimated the wild rose as an ingredient. Yangdup Lama and his team made us realise how special it was,” says Lachic.
Back at Tsas, the new cocktails created by Lama with Neel Ghosh, a young bartender from The Brook, who has travelled with him, read like cartography. Donn Ley, milk-washed tequila with apricot jam and a rim of apricot kernels, channels Ladakh’s orchards. Khawa Chan borrows from butter tea, infusing whiskey with yak cheese and barley, and topping it with a crisp khapse biscuit. Siachen Sip brings syah roses into gin vermouth. And the Bounty of Baltistan closes the evening in mulberries steeped from Turtuk, finished with aquafaba foam and mint.
A bar program like this is unlike any the region has seen before. For Lachic, the goal is not to replicate the past exactly, but to preserve the knowledge and the ingredients while opening them to contemporary interpretations that keep the culture alive for the future.
The ingredients we’ve seen over the last few days are also the stars of the seven-course tasting menu at Tsas, which moves like Ladakh itself: spare yet abundant, resilient yet surprising. Dro Beignets carry apricots from the Dolkhar orchard, paired with whipped labo, a ricotta-like cheese. Mongol Tacos transform local black peas (nakshan) into a decadent refried treat, cradled in soft breads made from leafy Mongolian greens. Nettles become velvet soups, barley grinds into tart shells, and seabuckthorn glows sharp in a popsicle palate cleanser.
In Tsogsti, a village where we meet metal artisan Ajang Phuntsog, Lama inspects copper vessels and wonders aloud if some might cradle cocktails one day. But few hands remain to carry the craft forward. “I personally realised that I didn’t know much about my own place, my own culture, my own people, because I never had the opportunity to grow up here. But after interacting with all these artisans and farmers from across Ladakh, I think the biggest fear in me was that all our indigenous practices are fading away,” Lachic says. That fear fuels her work. In Dolkhar’s villas, there is no paint, only mountain clay. The floors are set with pebbles and slate, and rugs are woven by Changthang weavers.
Like in many other parts of the world, the younger generation in Ladakh is still cooking traditional recipes, though not to the same extent as before. A few dishes remain popular in households, but many others have faded from everyday practice. Often, even when traditional recipes are cooked, they are adapted with modern ingredients that are more accessible today, rather than those that might have been used a decade ago.
Lachic explains that “This contrast is especially clear between Leh and rural areas. In Leh, where modern goods and produce are readily available, food habits have shifted more significantly. In rural Ladakh, however, younger people continue to engage with a wider range of traditional recipes because they still have access to the ingredients and practices that support them.”
Ladakh’s food culture also carries a strong Kashmiri imprint, woven into both its daily rhythms and festive tables. In Leh’s markets, traditional Kashmiri bakeries display shelves of breads that are as integral to Ladakhi mornings as butter tea. At celebratory feasts too, Kashmiri dishes often share space with local fare. “In many of our home feasts, we include Kashmiri dishes. The two regions have always had a lot in common. The extreme weather is a significant one,” notes Lachic. It’s no surprise, then, that one of the most memorable dishes on the Tsas menu is a fragrant, flavourful Gucchi Pulao.
According to Lachic, preservation comes with responsibility. “Ladakhi food is earthy and humble. Not everything has to be reinvented. Sometimes an ingredient needs to be re-seen, other times it needs to be left alone.”
What emerges is a regenerative model: one that supports farmers, foragers, and artisans; sparks curiosity and pride in younger Ladakhis; and offers visitors a deeper way to connect with the land they travel through. It’s in these intimate stories, passed down through kitchens and courtyards, that the spirit of Ladakh comes alive.
In the evening light, the apricot trees are heavy. Beyond them, the mountains turn indigo, their silence deeper than nightfall. “One of my sweetest childhood memories is of my great-grandmother, Abi Pal-ley, and her quiet rituals with apricot kernels,” Lachic recalls. “She would sit by her little vegetable garden, sunlight falling on her weathered hands, and with a stone she had chosen carefully, crack open the kernels one by one.” Some were eaten, some transformed into bracelets, threaded patiently together, each kernel holding her love and care.
For Lachic, those bracelets were more precious than gold, more lasting than ornament: “When I got restless or hungry, I would nibble on the kernels, turning them from trinket to snack. Looking back, that memory holds so much of Ladakh for me, especially our connection to the land, the sweetness of small things, and the way love often shows itself in the simplest of gestures.”
And in that, Ladakh reveals itself not only in the grandeur of its mountains and monasteries, but in the quiet, enduring rituals that bind memory, land, and love.
The Ladakh-inspired cocktail program created by Yangdup Lama’s The Brook, in partnership with Tsas by Dolkhar will travel to Cobbler & Crew in Pune on 11th September 2025; Late Checkout in Mumbai 2025 on 14th September; Native Cocktail Room and Primitive in Jaipur on 28th September.
