About Karachi Kanteen
Karachi Kanteen began with a very simple idea: to cook the Karachi I knew.
I grew up in Karachi, but I have spent much of my adult life away from it. And the longer you live away from a city, the more you realise that what you miss isn’t necessarily the grand things. It is the ordinary things. A bun kabab. A proper plate of biryani. Chicken tikka straight from the charcoal. Nihari on a Sunday. Daal, Baingan ka Bharata, Shaami Kabab. The food you grew up eating without ever thinking that one day you might have to search for it.
I first created Karachi Kanteen in Pakistan in 2017. It was my way of telling the story of my city through its food. Years later, that same idea has travelled with me to London.
Karachi Kanteen London isn’t meant to be fine dining, and it isn’t an interpretation of Pakistani food designed to make it fashionable. It is deliberately uncomplicated. The menu is short because I would rather cook fewer things properly. Some dishes come from our homes, some from the streets of Karachi, some from the old restaurants and institutions we grew up with. Together, they are a memory of a city.
There is biryani with potatoes, bun kabab, Bihari kabab, chicken tikka, korma cooked with desi ghee, haleem, nihari, paye, khamiri roti and the food that rarely gets celebrated but perhaps says home most clearly: a bowl of daal with fresh white rice or roti.
For someone who knows Karachi, I hope something on the table takes them back.
And for someone who has never been there, I hope Karachi Kanteen gives them a small taste of why those of us who come from that complicated, chaotic, extraordinary city remain so attached to it.
This isn’t Karachi reinvented.
It is simply the Karachi I remember.