Food & Nightlife

Gulmarg Restaurants All of the Gulmarg hotels have restaurants of varying standards. Most serve similar style Kashmiri and Indian food, but the quality varies considerably. Most travellers will tend to have breakfasts and dinners included as part of a package. If you want a change from your own hotel there are quite a few options. For dinner, try the following:

Highlands Park is a great place and serves up the best food on the hill. You can eat in the bar as well.

New Pine Palace has a pizza oven which sadly was broken for much of 2010. If it’s going, from all reports they do great pizza. Other standard Kashmiri fare is available as is alcohol.

Grand Mumtaz does some good stuff, but avoid the mutton balls. Their texture was remarkably glandular and suspicion was rife that they were directly from some local rams!

Hilltop Hotel gets some good reviews.

If not skiing, the market is a great place to do lunch. You can play a bit of Russian roulette in the market and eat at any number of dodgy venues. It is said that getting sick in India isn’t a question of if, but when, so you may as well have a fair dinkum crack and try some different nosh. (However pack appropriate medication such as Lomotil and Stemetil). An un-named restaurant three doors along from the Gulmarg Ski Shop serves up lovely scorched flesh cooked over hot coals. Apparently they also serve up a fair amount of hashish.

A few fellow skiers suggested that the Bakshi restaurant on the other side of the Gulmarg Ski Shop was worthy of a visit. Whilst the food seemed OK, the local rodents obviously thought so as well. Several were running around on the floor in amongst the feet of the lunchtime crowd.

Gulmarg Nightlife After some serious high altitude big mountain skiing, a meal and sleep might be the only nightlife that interests you. However if a few cold frothys takes your fancy a couple of places are worth a visit.

Gulmarg has two bars of note: Pine Palace, a smoky den of iniquity at the top of the village; and Highlands Park, a genteel step back in time to colonial days. Of the two, Highlands Park is bigger, more comfortable and atmospheric. It also serves up the best food on the hill. Pine Palace has the cheaper booze and a relaxed feel, more like a typical ski bum watering hole. The toughest thing to get used to again is the presence of smoke in the bars, particularly at the Pine Palace.

Beer Warning The local 650ml bottles of Kingfisher ‘Strong Premium Beer’ are delicious, and depending on the bottle will either get you drunk or extremely drunk. The label explains why. The alcohol content of each bottle varies between 5.25 and 8.25%. You have been warned!

Gulmarg Water The one thing that sets Gulmarg apart from the rest of India is that you can drink the water from the taps without completely fearing repercussions of the severe bowel movement kind. A water treatment plant was recently constructed and seems to do the job.