Azmat Ali Mir Shops for Sarposh

A fair percentage of Azmat Ali Mir’s time is spent flying between Bangalore, where she lives and runs her award-winning Kashmiri restaurant Sarposh, and Kashmir, from where she hails. The restaurant, despite being so far from the motherland, is the finest one of its kind, including restaurants in Kashmir itself that serve Kashmiri food. There is one proviso however: Sarposh requires five times the effort that a similar restaurant within the Valley would entail. Young Azmat is fully up to the task, however, she makes at least four visits to Kashmir per year and has designated duties for each visit. For example, June is the time when pran or shallots ripen in the fields, so that is her focus for the summer trip. When UpperCrust caught up with her, she was planning a trip to Bandipora in North Kashmir, where, it is widely acknowledged, the best pran grows. As you cannot cook wazwan without generous quantities of shallots, fried and then pounded into a paste, much of Azmat’s summer efforts go into sourcing this secret ingredient in Kashmiri banquet food, then peeling, trimming, packing.

Her trip at the beginning of winter is busy for saffron, which is grown on the farm of an employee of Sarposh who hails from Pampore. Once it is processed, it is packed into airtight bags and hand-carried all the way to Bangalore. But that is not the only ingredient that is grown on the land owned by the staff at the restaurant: every family outside the cities in Kashmir have trees and fields, and Azmat takes pride in buying ingredients with traceability as well as looking after her staff-family in one fell swoop. Hence, walnuts, apricots, apricot kernels and almonds all come from single trees rather than some anonymous plantation. And they are all grown by staff members’ families, on their ancestral properties.

Even morel mushrooms, a foraged product that forms spontaneously in oak forests in the uplands of the Valley, are foraged by Sarposh staff members’ families and sold to Azmat on her trips home, as is the restaurant’s entire stock of rajma. Collard greens: the quintessential Kashmiri leafy vegetable haakh is bought in batches throughout the year partly from Azmat’s kitchen garden in Srinagar and partly directly from select vegetable farmers, as are local greens like mallow, knapweed, dandelion greens and purslane. What this feisty young lady’s garden does yield for the restaurant include lavender, dried mint powder and poppy seeds. Plus, all the vegetables that are eaten through the winter in their sundried form: tomatoes, aubergine, bottle gourd, turnips are meticulously prepared by Azmat’s granny.

You might not meet Azmat’s parents and grandparents at Sarposh, but their shadow never leaves the premises!