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The Afghani trader has always been a part of my childhood. I grew up listening to “Ai Mere Pyare Watan” from the film Kabuliwallah, and pictured the visitor as someone jovial and generous carrying a huge sack of goodies, quite like a regional Santa Claus.

Even now, years later, I tend to connect food with Afghanistan, despite the ravages of war. Several years ago, I encountered something called the Afghani chicken.

Though I suspect it had little to do with Afghanistan, it was still quite a delicious way of cooking chicken – with basic whole spices, and grilled in a tandoor. In the last few years, I notice the Afghani chicken figures in almost every little neighbourhood take-away. And now, of course, it’s almost as common as the tandoori chicken. But I went in search of an Afghani restaurant in Delhi last week not because I was in the mood for some Afghani chicken.

On the contrary, I wanted to see what the food of the region was all about. A few friends had been telling me about a couple of Afghani restaurants in the city. I went hunting for one such restaurant that had been recommended by a young foodie in the Lajpat Nagar area.

The only sign of anything Afghani there was the traffic, which was almost as chaotic as the television images of the streets of Kabul.

Then, another friend urged me to try out a place in Ballimaran. So sometime last week, I went looking for it.

I got into Ballimaran from Chandni Chowk, and entered a gate at the T-junction of Ballimaran and Gali Qasimjan.

This was Sharif Manzil, and Kabuli Restaurant was down there, hidden somewhere in a maze of lanes and bylanes crowded by dilapidated buildings.

The only way to find this place is by asking people for directions.

That is what I did. Kabuli Restaurant is small, but nice and cheery. It’s run by an Afghani gentleman called Mohammed Shakhel. Hundreds of Afghani refugees came to India when trouble broke out in Afghanistan in the early Eighties. Shakhel was one of them.

You get kababs, pulaos, biryanis, korma and other such delicious stuff (including momos!) at Kabuli. You can have your biryani cooked with either buff or lamb. I opted for lamb, and asked for a plate of biryani, some korma, koftas and a spinach dish.

The great thing about Afghani food is that the dishes are not spiked with spices. The meat in the biryani, for instance, had a wonderful aroma of whole spices, but didn’t do an over-kill.

The koftas were small and soft and even the korma was quite different from its Delhi cousin. The oil quotient was less and the gravy was lighter.

The meat was perfectly cooked. The spinach was really nice, too – lightly cooked, mashed and spiced. The biryani is for Rs.100, the mutton gravies are for Rs.70 and the spinach is for Rs.50.

Our refugees tell the story of troubled – and peaceful – times in the world. Many have returned to Afghanistan, which is still going through turmoil.

But people like Mohammed Shakhel remind us that there is nothing called borders when it comes to food.

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