Kesar Da Dhaba

If you walk through the narrow lanes of Chowk Passian in Amritsar, you’ll eventually find us. It’s been this way for a very long time. The kitchen is almost always busy, and the heat from the big stoves is something you just get used to after a while. We start early in the morning, getting the lentils ready and making sure the dough is set. There isn't much room for standing around because the space is tight and there are always people coming in. The street outside is usually crowded with rickshaws and people walking to the nearby shrines. We don't use fancy machines; a lot of what we do is still done by hand, the same way it was done years ago. It’s noisy and loud, and someone is always shouting an order or moving a heavy pot. We don't have air conditioning that works all that well, so it gets sweaty, but nobody seems to mind much. We just put the food on the plates and keep moving. By the end of the day, we are tired and covered in flour, but we come back and do it again the next morning. It’s just how life is in the old city. We don't need a lot of talk to explain what we do. The smell of the food usually does that for us before people even reach the door. We aren't looking to change anything. We just keep cooking the way we know.