£26Butter Chicken, 1974
Tomato reduced six hours, cold butter, fenugreek. The one dish we will never take off.
Thamel · Kathmandu
Cooked over coals,
seasoned by memory
Live-fire cooking, heritage spice blends and a seasonal tasting menu in the heart of Thamel.
Agni means fire
Two clay ovens, lit at eleven, never allowed to cool
Our kitchen is built around live heat. Everything that can be cooked over coals is, and everything that can't is finished beside them. The result is food that tastes of smoke and patience rather than of a spice cupboard.
Chef Anaya Raghavan trained in Chettinad and cooked for a decade across Lyon and Copenhagen before opening AGNI. The menu reads as regional Indian, but the produce is almost entirely Himalayan — mountain lamb, valley trout, vegetables from three growers in the Kathmandu Valley.
- 36h
- Dal over embers
- 18
- Masalas ground daily
- 400°C
- Tandoor at service
What people come back for
Four dishes that define us
The rest of the menu changes with the season. These do not.
£26
£34Hyderabadi Lamb Biryani
Sealed under pastry, opened at your table. Forty minutes from order to lid.
£19Coal-Roast Chicken Tikka
Twelve hours in hung yoghurt and black cardamom, four minutes over coals.
£16Dal AGNI
Black urad set over embers for thirty-six hours. Nothing else in the pot but time.
Chef’s table
The Coal Menu
Seven courses drawn from whatever the coals and the market give us that week. Served to the whole table until 21:00.
£95
7 courses, per guest
£65
Wine & chai pairing
The spice room
We grind at seven, we cook at noon
No masala in this kitchen is older than a day. Whole spices are dry-roasted each morning and ground to order, which is why a curry here tastes floral rather than dusty.
- Kashmiri chilli and Tellicherry pepper, milled daily
- Ghee clarified in-house every Tuesday
- Paneer set fresh each morning from Jersey milk
- Yoghurt hung overnight for every tandoori marinade
Sixteen seats at the bar
Spirits infused with the same spice box
The bar runs on the kitchen's ingredients — curry leaf, tamarind, jaggery, black salt. Every cocktail has a considered zero-proof version, priced lower.
Tamarind Negroni
£15Gin, Campari, tamarind vermouth, orange oil.
Curry Leaf Gimlet
£14Curry-leaf gin, lime cordial, green peppercorn tincture.
Chai Old Fashioned
£16Masala-chai bourbon, jaggery, cocoa bitters.
Jaljeera Highball
£13Cumin vodka, mint, black salt, soda. Also served zero-proof.
“The dal alone justifies the trip. Thirty-six hours of embers is not marketing — you can taste every one of them.”
“Kathmandu has plenty of ambitious Indian restaurants. AGNI is the rare one that feels like a kitchen rather than a concept.”
“A biryani that arrives sealed, steaming and genuinely worth the forty-minute wait.”
Tables open sixty days ahead
Come hungry, stay late
Thamel Marg, Thamel, Kathmandu, 44600. Walk-ins welcome at the bar; everything else we recommend booking.