BEST Restaurant In Islamabad (Monal) 🇵🇰

Dinner at Monal, high in the hills above Islamabad, with Mac and the friends they had made weeks earlier in Karachi, who have travelled up.

Two things happen worth recording. A stranger takes over the taxi negotiation — asked 2,000 rupees against an app price of 895, Harry starts working the rank, and a passer-by steps in and argues on his behalf until somebody sensible takes the job. And at the end, the friends from Karachi pay the bill without telling anyone, so Harry doesn’t know to this day what the meal cost.

The restaurant itself is up a long series of switchbacks with the whole city laid out below it, which he says the camera can’t capture and asks the viewer to take on trust.

Obs: this page is based on auto-generated subtitles; amounts the transcript leaves ambiguous are marked unverified.

Key moments

• [00:00] 2,000 rupees asked for the ride; Uber says 895. Harry’s response is that he is in no rush and will work down the rank until someone is reasonable — the clearest statement of his method in the cluster.
• [01:36] A stranger with no stake in it takes over the negotiation on his behalf.
• [03:44] He pays 2,000 in the end anyway (from video – unverified), on the grounds that the driver who took them was decent and the road up is long, winding and hard work.
• [02:43] The drive up: switchbacks into the Margalla Hills with the city spreading out flat and lit behind.
• [05:27] Security on the door: bags searched, and his drone refused entry — he wasn’t intending to fly it and couldn’t explain that through the language gap.
• [07:30] Chicken karahi and a second chicken dish, with chapati and garlic naan. He is taught to scoop with the bread rather than use cutlery, and rates the garlic naan good enough to eat on its own.
• [10:42] Chocolate molten lava cake, his first ever, eaten with ice cream on the strength of Mac’s insistence — the hot-and-cold, hard-and-gooey contrast is what he singles out.
• [13:28] Gulab jamun to finish: very soft, very sweet, warm.
• [13:59] The bill is already paid. Their Karachi friends settled it quietly while they were eating dessert.

Extracted pages

• Islamabad
• Karachi
• Pakistan
• Mac
• Insist on paying