Gulmarg Restaurants

All of the Gulmarg hotels have restaurants of varying standards. Many travellers will have breakfast and dinner included as part of a hotel package but if you want a change from your own hotel there are quite a few options. Most serve similar style Kashmiri and Indian food, but the quality varies considerably. If you’re vegetarian there’s plenty of food choice, but if you’re vegan good luck.

The Khyber Hotel has the best restaurant at Gulmarg. For dinner you can choose from a very high quality buffet or a la carte dishes including a range of gourmet western cuisine such as New Zealand lamb, steaks, salmon and pasta.

Hotel Highlands Park also has fantastic meals, which are mostly Kashmiri, along with a little bit of western fare. You can also eat in the lounge bar, and there are lots of yummy appetizers on offer.

Pine Palace has a nice pizza oven that produces great pizza. Other standard Kashmiri fare is available, as is alcohol.

Grand Mumtaz does some good stuff, but avoid the mutton balls. Their texture was remarkably glandular and suspicion was rife that they were directly from some local rams!

If you have a day off from skiing and snowboarding, the market is a great place to do lunch. You can play a bit of Russian roulette in the market and eat at any number of dodgy venues, so keep an eye out for the eateries with rodents running around on the floor! The bakery is a safe option for ridiculously cheap food, and there is a little restaurant near the Gulmarg Ski Shop that serves up lovely scorched flesh cooked over hot coals that you can have with some hashish!

Gulmarg Nightlife

It’s a myth that there is no Gulmarg nightlife and no alcohol available. Whilst alcohol isn’t available in most hotels, it is possible to sniff it out and find an après ski scene. The other rumour is true, in that you’re highly unlikely to meet any local Kashmiri women and that the bars are mostly full of blokes.

Wine is either really expensive or difficult to come by, spirits are limited to the basics, whilst beer is readily available in the bars. So if a few cold frothies takes your fancy, Gulmarg definitely has a couple of bars worth visiting.

The best bar is at Hotel Highlands Park, a genteel step back in time to colonial days. The Highlands Park has a great atmosphere and lots of the Gulmarg regulars head there, so it’s a great spot to get the local goss.

The Hotel Pine Palace is a smoky den of iniquity at the top of the village. Pine Palace has slightly cheaper booze and a relaxed feel, more like a typical ski bum watering hole. A couple of nights a week there are snow safety tutorials, which tends to pull in a foreign crowd.

Beer Warning

The local 650ml bottles of Kingfisher ‘Strong Premium Beer’ are delicious, and depending on the bottle will either get you drunk or extremely drunk. The label explains why. The alcohol content of each bottle varies between 5.25 and 8.25%. You have been warned!

Gulmarg Water

The one thing that sets Gulmarg apart from the rest of India is that you can drink the water from the taps without completely fearing repercussions of the severe bowel movement kind.