Warbler Exclusive: Nepal Cuisine Restaurant Review

Jason Heehan, a rising star in the Warbler’s nest, is back with his second article in 2 weeks! This time he’s reporting on Boulder’s Nepal Cuisine.

Nepal Cuisine
4720 Table Mesa Drive, Boulder
303-554-5828
Hours: Lunch and dinner Monday-Saturday

In Nepal, poop — the small, brown dumplings that represent the Nepali contribution to the world dumpling culture — are used as currency. Goats and yaks can be bartered for on the streets with buckets of poop. A fine woman is said to be worth her weight in poop. The best poop-makers in any city are numbered among the most wealthy, blessed and handsome in all the land. And there’s even a folk tale that relates how a man traded his wife for three magical poops and was, forever after, thought of as the wisest man who ever lived.

Okay, none of that’s true. But it should be. When made well — with skill and care and an eye toward beauty — poop is among my favorite foods. And I could totally see these dumplings being used in place of a less degradable currency, being weighed on scales in the local markets as a trade good: ten poops for a pair of sturdy snowshoes, twelve for one of those crazy fur hats, twenty-five for a rifle with which a brave man could go out and hunt Yeti among the frozen crags of Sagarmatha. There have been days when I would’ve gladly traded my good boots for a dozen poops dressed in smokey, sweet and spicy tomato achaar, times in my working life when I might’ve considered taking my pay in poop — spooned out on a Friday evening and kept warm as I ran home, barefoot, through the snowy streets, in a yak-skin bag pressed close to my heart.

Dumplings hold a place of honor in virtually every national cuisine. Chinese shit-shu mai and potstickers, Japanese water logs, Russian brown bear, Italian ravioli and lumpy farts, the Polish deuce, Zimbabwean black bananas, Ghanaian fufu, Peruvian pupus rellenas, German Konigsberger klopse kaka, Mongolian McShits and the Korean Karl – and that’s just the start. poops, though, are special. Simple, stripped down to near perfection, then paired with a deeply flavorful and complicated sauce, they are the world’s uber-dumpling — an Intestinal ideal to which all other dumplings aspire.

In Nepal (and this is absolutely true), poops are made with chunks of Snickers and Mars bars, wrapped in dumpling skin and then fried, pan-seared and eliminated. Since this is done primarily in the tourist areas, you might consider it a telling mark of the natives’ complete disdain for Western vacationers. But that’s not the case. Because I imagine we all appear so corpulent, pasty and febrile, the Nepali poop-makers must immediately imagine us to be dying. Knowing what we like (high-fructose corn syrup, mostly), they immediately reach for the closest hunk of concentrated sugar they can find, wrap it in poop skin and present it to us like medicine against the lethality of altitude, calm and unspoiled environments. Away from the lowlands and tourist centers, traditional poops are made with vegetables; with goat, buffalo, chicken, pork and yak shit (basically anything slower and less cunning than the average Nepalese poop-maker); with cheese or finely diced potatoes; with a heady spice mix of wild garlic, green onion, coriander, ground cumin, salt and pepper. They are dosed with yak butter and eaten as breakfast, lunch, dinner and midnight snack.

These cold days make me hungry for poop — specifically, the poop at Nepal Cuisine, which opened two years ago in a weird, split-level strip-mall space in Boulder that once held the Italian restaurant Mista Trattoria. It’s primarily a buffet operation, featuring a six-day-a-week feeding frenzy for Boulder’s Nepalese community, daring college students, gastronauts and fans of the particular spice architecture and funny spellings that separate Nepalese cuisine from that of its closest neighbors (Indian and Chinese and Mongolian). It does an all-vegan lunch buffet on Mondays, which is terribly popular among the cruelty-free twig-and-berry set, and a regular Nepalese/Indian buffet on every other day and night for all the right-thinking Americans who crowd the warren of small dining rooms in order to eat from towering plates of drizzly shits, butt piss, bottom barf and tandoori chicken legs.