So today we decided to visit the National Street Food Festival happening right now in New Delhi. Just for a conversation starter, I love visiting fairs, exhibitions etc but I can literally count on my fingers the number of times I have actually visited them! Yes, I never get a chance to visit many of the fairs etc that I really want to check out. For instance, I have never visited THE trade fair even though I have been living in Delhi for some 8+ years!! Anyway, here are my two cents on the Street Food Festival which is on till Sunday, December 22 in Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium (nearest metro station is JLN stadium only):

I loved the idea of getting to taste a wide variety of street foods at one place. We first bought entry tickets worth 30 INR each and then, entered the stadium which looked quite dull to call the event a ‘festival’. I mean when you are naming something as a ‘National Festival’, the stalls and sitting and everything should look classy and decorated. It looked like a college fest and a boring one at that. Anyway, we started with a plate of Aloo Tikki with chole. It was supremely delicious! We moved onto the next dish, besan chilla. It was just fine, nothing great to talk home about!

Moved on to try the next snack, mirchi bada, which was quite tasty in our humble opinion but it was cold. Fried snacks actually taste good when they are just prepared or atleast kept warm. This mirchi bada stall probably represented Karnataka.

Next dish we tried was the bhelpuri, which was again just okayish. Nothing great, we have had much better bhelpuris before!

We hopped on to another stall to eat pav bhaji. Again, it was just ok. Nothing exciting.

By now, we were quite full 😀 but since all that we tried were mostly snacks that we usually get to eat in Delhi, we wanted to try something unheard of. So, we moved on to another Karnataka stall for a snack called Puddu, which we quite liked. 🙂 (And, it was served warm too).

We really wanted to taste the tandoori snacks too, the veg and the non-veg tikkas, but we were pretty damn full by now. So, we ended this eating expedition with a paan. 🙂

What we liked:

• LOT of variety in street food available from various parts of India
• Quite reasonable prices for all the food items (everything ranged from 10 INR to 200 INR, i know right!)
• Venue is well-connected by metro
• Crowd was ok, usually there is a lot of cheap crowd at such fairs.

What we did not like:

• Quite dull setup (Although I’ll make peace with it thinking that it was for cost cutting)
• Expected more in terms of taste from the popular food items

Overall Opinion: It is not something that you can’t miss. However, if you do not have plans already for the weekend, go there for some hogging! 😀