Naga pork curry, Assamese fish tenga, Mizo beef curry and more at this festival

Naga pork curry and fermented soya bean or akhuni Photograph via Northeast Food Festival’s Facebook page

The Apatani tribes in Arunachal Pradesh make a delightfully fragrant, moist rice, flavoured with a spicy green chilli-garlic paste and cooked with minced chicken in a hollow bamboo shoot container over wood fire. It’s all the more fun if you eat the slippery rice with chop sticks. We ate it on a cold, cold, rainy afternoon in Ziro in Arunachal Pradesh and would trade nothing for the experience. If you’re in Bengaluru this week, the Northeast Food Festival maybe your best place to get the dish.

Besides Naga style fried fish, Chubalas Rice and Curry, one of the restaurants at the festival will serve dishes such as Tzudikong Red wine infused Chili Pork Ribs Photograph via Northeast Food Festival’s Facebook page

Over 35 food stalls are being up in Kammanahalli, where the third edition of the Northeast Food Festival will be held. “Besides a few restaurants, a lot of excellent home chefs will be cooking at the festival. I feel the further you are away from home, the more you crave for the flavours of home food and the better you get at cooking it,” says Rini Ralte, president of Northeast Solidarity, which runs a helpline for North East Indians in Bengaluru and is organising the festival. Most of the dishes at the festival are, in fact, off the menu at even restaurants that serve authentic food from parts of the North East. For instance, there will be a stall serving only Lotha Naga (a major tribe from Nagaland) food or one where you can get tungtap, a fermented fish chutney, and other delicacies made by the Khasi and Jaintia tribes of Meghalaya.

Some stalls will also sell ingredients such as the Umorok or king chillies from Manipur, mushroom, bamboo shoot, fermented soyabean and meat pickles among others. “We started the festival because we not only wanted to celebrate the food of North East India but also raise funds for the helpline. We expected 1,000 people last year and 3,000 showed up. At the second edition for Christmas last year, 7,000 people attended the fest. So for a change, there is something positive in the news about North East Indians,” says Ralti.

The Northeast Summer Food Festival will be held on August 13 at Campus Crusade in Kammanahalli. Go here for other details.