We began on a marble slab,
in an alley off Baneshwor.

Before the kitchen, before the bamboo baskets, before the twelve-fold rule, there was a slab of marble. A scrap, really — off-cut from a stonemason on Pasang Lahmu Marga. Cold to the touch even at noon. We carried it home across the road.

Marble keeps the dough relaxed. Plastic warms; wood absorbs; steel sticks. Marble does nothing — and that is exactly what dough needs. We dust it with rice flour, work it cold, fold it quickly. Twelve pleats per momo. We have never managed eleven, and we have never needed thirteen.

For the first two years we ran a hatch — a single window, three steamer baskets, one stove. A queue would form by 11:15. By 13:00 we were out. Customers learned to walk straight from Uniglobe College, to skip the photograph, to take whatever we were folding that day.

"In the alley, you don't get to negotiate. The momo arrives. You eat. You make space."

A larger room came later. The marble slab moved with us. So did the queue, mostly.

When the food-delivery apps arrived in 2018, a quiet man with a tablet walked in and asked us to sign. The cut was 28%. The packaging would be theirs. The rider would carry their badge. We thanked him and said no.

Instead we put a phone number on a chalkboard outside. Then a WhatsApp. Then a website — this one. We answer the phone. We hand the food over the counter or to our own rider. Twenty-eight percent buys a great deal of yak cheese.

Once a fortnight, a wrapped wheel of yak cheese rides the early bus down from Langtang. It is from one dairy. It is always the same dairy. The driver knows to ring the bell when he gets to the corner — we go out and meet him with the kitchen door open.

That cheese goes into our No. 11. A small thing. But the kind of small thing that, if you stop doing it, the whole place becomes somewhere else.

Whether to add a fish momo. Whether the jhol broth needs a second roast or a third. Whether we should ever, under any circumstance, put cream cheese in a momo (we will not). Whether to open earlier on Saturdays.

We will probably never settle any of these. Come fold a few with us and tell us what you think.

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