Waza The Kashmiri Chef

Our place is over at 13/A/1 on P.D. Tandon Road in the Civil Lines area of Allahabad. If you’re heading towards the High Court or coming from the Kanpur Road side, you’ll see us near City Life and the Talwalkars gym. We focus on Kashmiri cooking here. It’s a specific kind of food that takes a lot of time to get right, so the kitchen is usually the busiest part of the building from early morning. The name Waza refers to the traditional chefs who handle these dishes, and we try to stick to those roots without making it a whole big production. Civil Lines is a pretty central part of town, so we get a good mix of people. Some are lawyers or workers from the High Court, and others are just families out for a meal. The interior is simple. We put the tables out, keep the place clean, and make sure the spices are fresh. It’s not a fancy corporate chain; it’s just us running a kitchen in Allahabad. We spend a lot of time prep work, chopping, and slow-cooking the meat. That’s just the way this food has to be made. We don't use a lot of big words to describe it. We just open the doors, cook the food we know how to make, and hope people enjoy their lunch or dinner before they head back out into the Civil Lines traffic. It’s a lot of heat and hard work, but we are used to it by now.