The Flavour of Lucknow

 SOME CITIES TALK, some cities sing — but Lucknow simply smiles. A poised, perennial smile that lingers like a thumri at twilight. With UNESCO naming Lucknow a Creative City of Gastronomy, that quiet smile has finally sailed across seas and continents. This honour is not merely for a place, but for a philosophy—an inheritance of grace, a genius for gentleness, a cuisine that whispers, woos and warms rather than shouts.

For me, Lucknow is lineage, not location. My grandmother—my father’s Ammi—came from Kurwar, just beyond the saffron-scented halo of the city. In her lullabies and longings, Lucknow rose like steam: neem-filtered sunshine, tamarind chutney cascading over aloo tikkis, and the chorus of “Bhaiyya, aur teekha!” ricocheting through bazaars. Her siblings’ homes brimmed with attar phials, paan trays lacquered with memory, and silver bowls of zarda glowing like golden punctuation marks. Their world was modest yet magnificent—everyday rituals elevated into soft ceremony, subtle splendour and slow-burning sweetness.

That is Lucknow’s alchemy—its ability to turn the ordinary into the ornamental, the simple into the sublime.

At my friend Nusrat Durrani’s table, the chaat and vegetarian biryani rekindled that truth. Aloo tikki—humble, unassuming—becomes a crisp couplet here. A golden ghazal that begins on the tongue and ends somewhere near the heart’s hidden hinge. Walk from Aminabad to Chowk and you are not strolling—you are reading.

Each lane is a line, each shop a stanza. Rahmatullah’s kebabs crackle with ancestral fire; Tunday Kababi’s tawa exhales centuries of refinement. Beneath Rumi Darwaza, bakarkhani scents braid themselves with architecture, turning history into inhalation. Time here isn’t linear—it’s layered, lacquered, lush, lingering.

I have wandered these lanes with Askari Naqvi and Madhavi Kukreja on their Sanatkada trail—a tour that feels less like movement and more like memory inhaled. When I brought my friend Anandita De here, she paused mid-bite and said, “This wasn’t a tour…this was a poem you could taste.” Lucknow does that—it permeates rather than performs, breathes rather than boasts.

The city also holds my personal elegies. My aunt, Aruna Lakhwara—Lucknow-born, America-bred—returns to me each time I think of kulfi falooda’s cooling caress or sheer khurma’s soft sweep of sweetness. In Lucknow, joy and grief sit side-by-side like respectful neighbours, each granting the other its quiet corner. Even sorrow tastes different here— softened by civility, seasoned with dignity, stirred with tenderness.

UNESCO’s honour merely affirms what Lucknow has long taught: Indian cuisine is not cacophony; it is craft. Dum is discipline. Patience is poetry. Here, biryani is a love letter—every grain a heartbeat, every aroma an afterthought of devotion. Malai paan melts like a benediction; nimish floats like a morning hymn. Kofta, korma, sheermal stand elegantly beside kadhi, arbi, lauki. This is the Ganga- Jamuni grammar of grace, where vegetarian and non-vegetarian don’t collide—they converse, collaborate and coalesce.

And the sweets—rabri thick as reverie, peda soft as prayer, saffron gajar halwa glowing like winter dusk, khasta gujiya cracking into celebration—are not desserts but deliberate couplets, crafted with calm, carried with care.

This is Lucknow’s syncretic splendour: temple bells and azaan in the same breeze, craftsmen and qawwals and cooks humming in harmonic unison. A city where culture is not curated but carried, not displayed but distilled—where even the air feels embroidered with etiquette and emotion.

Lucknow may now belong in UNESCO’s list, but many of us inscribed it long ago in a more intimate archive—the map of memory, the manuscript of affection, the atlas of taste.

Where flavour meets finesse,where tenderness turns into tradition,where the past and present clasp hands gently—that is Lucknow.