Two nights in Lucknow, eaten in the correct order

A city best seen after dark

Lucknow in February is cold enough that you want to keep moving, which suits it, because the whole city seems to switch on at about six in the evening.

We had two days and no real plan beyond a list of places to eat, which in Lucknow is a perfectly respectable itinerary.

The street, once it gets going

Hazratganj

Hazratganj is the middle of it. Colonial buildings painted in the same cream and picked out with lights, a road full of people who are clearly not in a hurry, and shops that stay open long past when they should.

HazratganjLights all down the road

The entrance to the market

The lighting is not subtle. Half the landmarks in this city get floodlit in colours that would look ridiculous anywhere else, and here it just works.

BlueGreen

In colour

Pink, obviously

Another oneThe clock tower end

The actual reason to come

Right. The food.

Lucknow does not really do one signature dish, it does a sequence, and the correct approach is to eat small amounts in many places rather than sit down anywhere properly.

We started with chai, because you have to.

Sharma Ji ki Chai

Then kachori, at a shop that has clearly been doing exactly this for a very long time and has no interest in doing anything else.

Bajpai Kachori Bhandar

Working the tawaThe street kitchen

Biryani

Then biryani, which in Lucknow is a different animal to the Hyderabadi kind. Lighter, subtler, more about the rice than the heat, served with a bowl of salan and a pile of raw onion that is not optional.

BiryaniWith the salan

Where it came from

And then kulfi, at eleven at night

Prakash ki Mashoor Kulfi is an institution, and on a February night there is still a crowd outside it.

Prakash ki Mashoor Kulfi

What you get is kulfi with falooda, in a bowl, eaten standing up on the pavement in the cold, which is objectively a strange thing to do and absolutely the right call.

The bowlThe other one

One each

Then sweets on the way back, because at that point you have stopped making decisions and are simply following the smell.

SweetsThe queue at the mithai shop

The Hazelnut Factory

Yellow, at the end of the night

The last of the lights

Two days, correctly spent

Lucknow is a weekend city, and the weekend is best spent walking between things you are going to eat.

• Go in winter. It is walkable then, and everything is lit.
• Eat in small portions across many stops. One sit-down meal will end the day.
• The kulfi is worth being cold for.