Ordering Jain food at Hinchko

About one in five of our guests eats Jain food, so our kitchen keeps a separate set of pots and a separate cook for it at every service.

A Jain thali has no onion, garlic, potato, carrot, ginger or any other root vegetable. Some guests also avoid green leafy vegetables on certain days, and some avoid food cooked after sunset. Tell your server what you follow when you sit down, and we will tell you which shaak can be served and which will be swapped.

On a typical day, two of the four shaak are already Jain, so we swap the other two for dishes such as raw banana, bottle gourd, tindora or a dry moong. The dal and kadhi are made without ginger in the Jain pot. Farsan is easier: khaman, khandvi and patra are made Jain by default, while the gota is not.

The Kathiawadi thali is harder to make Jain, because so much of it depends on garlic and potato. We can do it, but it is mostly Gujarati dishes on a Kathiawadi plate, so we suggest the Gujarati thali instead. During Paryushan we cook a Jain-only lunch thali for eight days and close the evening service early for guests who eat before sunset. The menu is sent to our WhatsApp list a week ahead.