Namaste. I'm Krishna. I'm 78 years old and more than 50 of them I'm cooking. I'm a chef.
I run a small restaurant in Pokhara. It is a city that spreads out near a serene lake on the foothills of the Himalayas in central Nepal. Nepal is called "a roof of the world" because of the highest mountains. A lot of people coming here for trekking and mountaineering. After they coming down from the mountains, what they crave is food. And Nepal has it all!
Nepali cuisine is a colourful mix of different culinary traditions. It absorbed influences from Indian, Chinese and Tibetan cuisines. However, the staple food that is eaten every day all over Nepal is called dal bhat tarkari. It is a dish made of steamed rice and a cooked lentil soup served with different vegetable curries and pickles. Tourists from all over the world also loves dal bhat.
But, since few months ago, I'm not cooking my dal bhat anymore.
I was born in 1942 in Namche bazaar, a small village in north-eastern Nepal not far from the mount Everest. I don't remember my parents. I lost them when I was very small. Luckily, good people took care of me and I started to living with them in Janakpur.
One day I got interested in cooking. I started to learn from culinary books and food programs on TV. Every time I saw new recipes - I was trying to re-create them. I was learning fast and became a good cook.
When I was 25, I went to Kathmandu to find some work and there I met Laxmi. She was very beautiful. First we were a friends, but then we fell in love and got married.
Soon after our wedding, we moved to Pokhara. I started to work on a construction of a dam. I managed to save a little money and we decided to open a small restaurant. There was only 2 or 3 restaurants in Pokhara back then. We made a tiny canopy among the rice fields. People loved to stay there outside in the sun. That's why we called our place "Sun Welcome".
Years went by and the life was good. We grew our own vegetables in our garden and always cooked fresh food from scratch. I was making my own sauces, grinding spices for masalas, baking cakes and apple pies. People loved our restaurant.
Many years later, I decided to see the world and explore the opportunities it offers. I made all the required papers and flew to Europe. After some travels, I found a job in a restaurant in Belgium. I worked there for some time before moving to England to work for another restaurant. That way I learned to cook many different western dishes.
After few years abroad, I returned to Nepal. Together with Laxmi we opened another, bigger and better "Sun Welcome". We created a new menu with many different western dishes along with the traditional ones.
But problems comes when you least expect them. One day, a massive landslide destroyed both our house and a restaurant. We lost everything we've had. My culinary books, our wedding photos and many more things - all got buried in mud.
We had to start over from the ground up. We moved to another place and opened another restaurant. Things went quite well and we were earning some money to be able to rent a house and pay salary for few workers. Many people were asking money for a wedding or buy land or build a house. My wife has a really soft heart, so she couldn't refuse. Not without reason the Hindu goddess of money is also named Laxmi.
In 2018, our landlord has raised the rent and we were forced to move out again. We had very little savings. ~~As a side effect of taking medicine from high pressure, my leg started to function bad.~~ We have no children or relatives to help us, so it was not easy to start all over again.
Anyway, we managed to rent a small place to live and built new "Sun Welcome" on a tight budget and started to cook again. Maybe it is not that big and pretty like our previous places, but what's important is that it still has our souls in it. We were happy to open our doors one more time to our dearest customers and friends. We kept our old menu with the same prices.
But in 2020, when pandemic came, our place became empty. Government forced every businesses to close completely for more than 3 months. Most of the tourists also left, so even when the lockdown was lifted and we could reopen again, we had zero revenue but still had to pay our rent. We found ourselves on a very edge of surviving.