Peshawar ULTIMATE Street Food Hunt 🇵🇰

The Peshawar answer to the Lahore food tour, and the video that settles Harry’s favourite food in Pakistan — beef pulao, eaten twice here, and he says so outright at the end. Breakfast to dinner across six-plus dishes, most of them in and around the Qissa Khwani bazaar.

The stops that stay with him are as much about the institutions as the food: a breakfast stall whose owner’s father worked the same patch of street for sixty years and pays nothing to be there; a rice hall shifting what looks like thousands of portions a day out of forty enormous pots cooked somewhere else entirely; the oldest tea shop in the city, where the guide explains that the bazaar’s name comes from traders resting here in the evenings and trading stories instead of goods, and where a bed upstairs still costs about 25 cents; and a soda house that has been hand-carbonating milk and fruit sodas since 1936 with a CO2 rig and no electricity.

Key moments

• [00:35] Peshawari breakfast, set up in the middle of the street: spinach, bread, and lassi poured out of a churn from the seller’s own cows.
• [02:21] It works as a breakfast because it isn’t heavy — no meat, and everything grown or made by the man serving it.
• [03:24] The stall has been handed down. His father worked this exact spot for 60 years, coming in from the countryside each morning, and there is no fee for the pitch.
• [03:54] The juxtaposition Harry points out — eating this way with the modern BRT running overhead.
• [04:25] He isn’t allowed to pay, and can’t even get a tip accepted.
• [05:22] The famous rice hall: around forty vast pots of beef pulao, rice, chickpeas, raisins and beef.
• [06:05] It’s cooked somewhere else and carried in. Portions are weighed out on old scales and eaten upstairs in rows on benches.
• [07:08] The beef is the most tender he says he has ever eaten, and what he can’t get over is that the quality survives being cooked at that volume — normally the first thing bulk cooking loses.
• [09:13] A dollar or two for a plate that size, with the portion assuming you’ll eat more than he does.
• [09:45] A lassi stall under the BRT station — sweet lassi with butter, almonds, honey, walnuts and dried fruit, served in a metal mug to hold the cold.
• [11:41] Halfway down he hits a chunk of paneer, which he was not expecting and takes some time to describe.
• [13:38] Kabuli Gate, named for Kabul, where the traders arrived from.
• [14:35] The oldest tea shop in Peshawar: coals underneath a flat pan, green chai with a little milk and sugar, in small handleless cups.
• [15:19] The upstairs terrace gives the best vantage over the bazaar.
• [16:29] The history, from his guide. Central Asian traders came through Afghanistan, did business through the day, and came here in the evening to rest — meeting other travellers over tea and exchanging routes, conditions and stories. That is where the bazaar’s name comes from.
• [17:02] They slept upstairs then, and you still can: 100 rupees, about 25 cents, for a bed, or a private room for a little more.
• [17:33] Peshawar was the winter capital of the Afghan kings, who spent nine months here and three in Kabul because Kabul’s winters were too harsh.
• [18:38] Men are asleep in the rooms above as he films. He half-seriously offers to spend a night there for a video if enough people subscribe.
• [20:13] A fruit and cream dessert — banana, apple, pomegranate, dates, almonds, syrup.
• [21:55] 160 rupees, roughly half a dollar, and the seller has to be talked into taking it.
• [23:05] A soda shop in a building he’s told is a couple of hundred years old.
• [24:07] It has been running since 1936 and is a hangout across generations: milk soda, pomegranate, lemon, orange and cola.
• [24:40] The fridge appears not to be electric either.
• [25:50] A British-era building next door dated 1902, with a Union Jack still on it.
• [26:20] The square’s memorial: British troops opened fire on peaceful protesters and many were killed, commemorated annually. His guide gives two different years for it in the same breath (from video – unverified).
• [26:51] Fizzy milk. He’s had it in Karachi, but never this carbonated, and the description he lands on is that it’s exactly as strange as it sounds.
• [27:59] Three sodas for about half a dollar. The pomegranate he compares to an Aperol spritz.
• [28:31] How it’s done: bottles loaded into a hand-pumped CO2 rig, no electricity anywhere — an antique SodaStream, in his words.
• [30:30] The food street, and the smell of it: chicken and lamb over wood coals with no temperature control at all.
• [31:23] Chapli kebab — the patty formed and turned one-handed — at 70 rupees, about half a dollar, normally eaten with paratha.
• [33:21] Beef pulao again, this time with bone marrow, which he is told is the special order.
• [35:51] The rice alone carries the flavour, which he calls a miracle given the quantities involved.
• [37:59] A man talking to him in Urdu switches into a perfect London accent mid-conversation and completely derails him.
• [39:13] The verdict: beef pulao is his favourite food in Pakistan. Aromatic rather than hot, and the beef tender when it’s done properly.

Extracted pages

• Place: Peshawar
• Country: Pakistan
• Tips: Insist on paying