Shinwari Cuisine: A Culinary Brand In Pakistan Of Pashtun Origins

Maryam Jillani traces the rise and popularity of Shinwari cuisine, food from one of Pakistan's 400 Pashtun tribes, and the cuisine’s singular commitment to lamb.

The sight of dumba (lamb) hung to dry and age, is familiar in Pakistan. I thought nothing of it when I visited my hometown, Islamabad, last spring till I realised that overnight, under the banner of Shinwari cuisine, it had become a culinary phenomenon in Pakistan.

When I was working on a story on Afghan food last spring, people kept directing me to Shinwari restaurants. There was a Shinwari restaurant two blocks from my home where there used to be a biryani joint. Another one at Saidpur Village, a village gentrified for those who wants a taste of “local, authentic food” without any of the discomfort. Several more in middle- and working class neighbourhoods that used to house Afghan refugees. Within the span of five years, Islamabad had found itself immersed in a sea of Shinwari restaurants dedicated to serving just one item: lamb.

The Shinwari Tribe

Shinwari is one of 350-400 Pashtun tribes, the majority of whom are settled in Afghanistan. In Pakistan, they are concentrated in Khyber Agency in Pakistan’s northwest Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, in the town of Landi Kotal, which sits right next to the primary commercial border crossing between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The tribe has been settled in that area for centuries, and when the security situation was better, tribe members were able to move freely between the border since they had ancestral land on both sides. Shinwari tribe members across both countries number less than one million — for context, Pakistan’s total population is close to 200 million.

Shinwari is by no means the most politically or culturally influential group from the KP province, and yet in recent years they have come to define Pakistan’s notion of what Pashtun food is. “There are more Shinwari restaurants than there are Shinwari people,” laughs Gulab Khan, co-owner of Islamabad’s flagship Shinwari restaurant, Khyber Shinwari Restaurant. Khan says that his Shinwari restaurant is one of the few, if not the only, in Islamabad owned by members of the Shinwari tribe itself, and was established long before Shinwari cuisine was trendy. Khan explains that the central item to Shinwari food is the lamb, which the restaurant serves in three ways: Shinwari tikka, lamb salted, skewered and fired on the grill; Shinwari karahi, lamb cooked in its own fat on high heat in a wok; or dum pukht, lamb cooked on slow heat in a large pot sealed with flour. Khan emphasises that true Shinwari food uses minimal spices, and the flavour comes from salt and the lamb fat that it is cooked or wrapped in. For this reason, it is imperative that the meat is prepared properly: it has to be drained and dried completely, and aged for at least one to two weeks.

The Legacy of Khyber Shinwari

Khan’s maternal uncle started the restaurant in the 90s, before passing the business on to his older brother, Feroz Shah. Khan came into the business in 2009 and oversaw the rapid growth of the restaurant, particularly following the launch of the multi-billion dollar Chinese-Pakistan-Economic Corridor (CPEC), a collection of infrastructure projects, launched in 2015. Despite the restaurant being removed from the city’s wealthier neighbourhoods where majority of the city’s expats live and eat, Khyber Shinwari restaurant developed a strong fan following among the city’s new stream of Chinese residents. The restaurant has two branches, and the owners are in conversations about starting one in China.

Pakistan’s new Chinese residents however, aren’t the only ones drawn to Shinwari cuisine. Khyber Shinwari Restaurant has also begun to draw customers from other ethnicities, such as Punjabi’s, as well. “Punjabis initially didn’t like the smell of lamb, but they have grown to appreciate it and become very discerning about the cut and quality of the meat they want,” Khan explains. Imran Khan (Imran), a development consultant who blogs about Pashtun food, says lamb is definitely preferred in Pakistan’s northwest frontier province where as you move further down south east, people begin to default to mutton (goat).

Imran tells me it was Nisar Khan Charsi Tikka (Charsi Tikka), Peshawar’s most famous restaurant, that popularised Shinwari food. While Charsi Tikka is not branded as a Shinwari restaurant, it serves tikka and lamb karahi prepared the Shinwari way. “There is no masala…it’s a very simple way of cooking. If you mess up even one small thing, you can mess up the whole dish,” he says. He contrasts it to newer Shinwari restaurants in Islamabad where they are not able to deliver consistently since they do not have the same turnover as Charsi Tikka that allows them to store high quantities of quality, aged meat. Charsi Tikka now enjoys cult status in Pakistan, with a line of international food video bloggers lining up to sit on the restaurant’s charpai’s (traditional woven bed) and dive into their classic lamb dishes. The name certainly adds to the allure. Charsi means “pothead,” a nickname that was given to the owner by his friends for enjoying a joint or two.

A Story of Displacement and Culinary Diversity

While Charsi Tikka may have played a role in putting dumba on the national map, the displacement of Pashtuns from the tribal belt starting from 2008 due to the worsening security situation and ensuring army operations certainly escalated the dissemination of Shinwari food. Niamat Sati, who co-owns the Sufi Shinwari Restaurant in Islamabad with his older brother, Dost Mohammad, said their business tripled after they changed their biryani fast-food restaurant to a Shinwari one around 2014. Veteran journalist Nusrat Javeed also points out that outsiders were already exposed to Shinwari food prior to the displacement, due to the strategic location of their home, Landi Kotal, nestled at the biggest trading border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Shinwari tribe members are mostly traders and businessmen, and they capitalized on the influx of visitors by opening a number of small restaurants and motels that served Shinwari food. Therefore, Javeed says, people developed a taste for Shinwari food long before restaurants began to pop up in urban centres outside of the KP province.

Nilofer Qazi, founder of the YouTube series, Pakistan on a Plate that maps local cuisine, expresses her frustration over people defaulting to food they are most familiar with. She explains that KP cuisine is incredibly varied due to the impressive diversity of climate and terrain of the province, and that the true range of food in the province is prepared in people’s homes rather than at restaurants. “The variety of food eaten inside the private sphere is in the hands of women and it’s time-consuming,” she says. “When you eat at a restaurant, you have to look at what you can make quickly, and what you can serve that the majority of Pakistani’s cannot eat at home? The auto-response is meat.” Khan and Qazi also find that Shinwari cuisine plays into what they term as the “Pashtun exotic factor” for outsiders. Qazi says the British developed a romantic narrative about Pashtun people, and that Shinwari food best fits within that box: a hearty, meaty food linked to a warrior people. “We haven’t developed an independent narrative post colonialism in terms of culture and certainly culinary culture,” Qazi laments, “For instance, why don’t we talk about gujjay salan (sorrel curry) that is also served in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa?”

Eating at a Shinwari restaurant does take a singular commitment to meat, specifically the dumba. As I wrapped up my research for this article, my cousin and her husband graciously accompanied me to Khyber-Shinwari Restaurant for a farewell meal. We tore through the salty, fatty tikka, and mopped up the rich tomato base of the karahi with a long, dense naan. We unsuccessfully pored through the menu to find a vegetable side, and therefore, had to rely on the creamy yogurt topped with toasted cumin seeds, and sliced cucumber to balance the heady flavour of lamb. While the reasons for the rise of Shinwari cuisine are indeed, layered, after I walked away from dinner, I could also not help but applaud the euphoric nature of that meal.

Maryam Jillani is an international educator and food writer. She founded the award-winning blog, Pakistan Eats and was TASTE magazine's first Cook In Residence. You can follow her on Instagram @pakistaneats.

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