More than momos: Trek down to this CBD basement for a taste of the Himalayas

Eaten any buff lately? Oh, you have? Then you’ve probably been to Lakhey, a city restaurant that aims to change the way Melbourne thinks about Nepalese food or, more realistically, encourage more Melbourne diners to think about Nepalese food at all.

Hundreds of our restaurants would grind to a halt without the Nepali chefs, cooks and dishwashers who power their kitchens, but the food of Australia’s ninth-largest migrant community doesn’t often feature in our high streets, food precincts or shopping centre courts.

The few Nepali restaurants that do exist are mostly modest little places with a focus on momos, the plump dumplings that are a Nepalese staple. You’ll never hear me complaining about dumplings – the more, the better – but there’s so much more to the cuisine of this mountainous country that’s wedged between north-eastern India and southern Tibet along the southern reaches of the Himalayas.

Go-to dish: Sukuti sadekho (dried buffalo meat salad).

Buff, for example. Buff is buffalo, and it’s a common meat in this mostly Hindu country because it doesn’t count as cow, which is venerated and not eaten. Buff turns up at Lakhey in a few dishes, including the famous momo, but my favourite is sukuti sadekho ($20), a meat salad, often served cold, but you can ask for it warm in winter.

Small pieces of buffalo meat are dried (traditionally over fire, but here in a slow oven), then fried and marinated with onion, tomato, coriander, garlic, chilli and spices including numbing timur, which is similar to Sichuan pepper. It’s a thrilling dish – like jerky but wearing fancy dress and heading out the door to a flavour party.

Shaphaley (fried flatbread stuffed with chicken mince and cabbage) served with hot sauce.

The shaphaley ($14) also cracked an invitation to the flavour festivities: this flatbread is stuffed with chicken mince and cabbage, fried to a dark crunch and served with very spicy chilli sauce (there’s a mild tomato alternative if you’re not bulletproof, as I pretended to be).

Mustang aloo ($12) is a bowl of skin-on potato wedges tossed with chilli and spring onions. They’re an excellent drinking snack but not quite as amazing or surprising as the crispy corn ($14), which feels like a cheerleader for beer. Fresh kernels are tossed with cornflour, deep-fried so they become nuggetty and shrivelled, then tumbled with spices and fresh, chopped capsicum. They define moreish: there’s no possibility of stopping until they’re all gone.

Momos are a popular order.

Exemplary momo ($15-$18) have house-made dumpling skins. There are vegetable, cheese, chicken and buff versions and they’re served plain, fried, tossed in spices and slaw, or in soup for winter. The momo platter ($30) is the most popular order. It’s not a wrong move: just make sure you’re trying other dishes, too, including the desserts, which are simple but excellent.

Lakhey does its version of ju ju dhau ($14), the “king of yoghurt” made famous in Bhaktapur, just east of Kathmandu. Set in a clay pot, it’s smooth and creamy.

Yomari ($12) are rice flour dumplings made in shapes that suggest teardrops, fish or fertility symbols, depending on who you ask. They’re stuffed either with khuwa, a kind of evaporated milk, or chaku, a nutty toffee. Spongy, sturdy and delightful, they recall the delights of other rice-flour sweets, such as nyonya kueh and Japanese mochi. It feels almost ceremonial to tear them apart for little nibbles.

It’s a thrilling dish – like jerky but wearing fancy dress and heading out the door to a flavour party.

Owner Prakash Kaji Thapa took over the year-old restaurant in the summer, but he’s been in Australia since 2008. During that time, he’s studied business as well as hospitality, and has worked in senior positions in gaming and function venues. This is his first business and it feels like a place trying to make a statement.

Lakhey does have presence: you step down from the street into a basement dining room, past a large Buddha statue and gold dragons overseeing proceedings. It’s named after mythical Nepali demon dancers, ferocious, fanged creatures represented in the restaurant’s neon signage and in a colourful mural. Brown banquettes line the walls and there’s a long, gold-backed bar.

You can probably tell I loved the food here but the experience had some shambolic moments. Service was patchy, swinging from tentative to attentive to “Am I invisible?” There were some offputting elements: the room was chilly, the rock soundtrack lurched from background to party-hard and the bathroom needed some attention.

I came away happy, though: the food from chefs Dinesh Adhikari and Dina Chhantyal is so exuberant and there’s obvious pride taken in the from-scratch offerings. If Lakhey can smooth out some of its rough edges, it’s likely to find a warm place for this high-altitude food on the sea-level flatlands of Melbourne.

This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine