Gulmarg's dining scene is small and mostly hotel-based. Most visitors eat breakfast and dinner where they sleep. In the village, Highlands Park is the strongest sit-down restaurant and has a bar; Bakshi Restaurant in the market near the police station is the practical local option; Pandit Dhaba is where to go for pure vegetarian and Jain food; Hotel Lupin is the café. Black Bear Brew, still recommended by older guides, is reported closed. Gareeb Nawaz, The Northwind Café and White Mountain Café cover quick food between ski sessions.
Gulmarg is known for powder, the gondola and the terrain around Mt Apharwat. Nobody comes here for the restaurants.
But you still have to eat, twice a day for a week, after six hours in the cold, and the guides that cover this either list places without saying anything about them, or describe "atmospheric dining experiences" without naming a single one.
This page names them. Where they are, what each is actually for, and what to expect.
We have run a ski school and guiding operation out of this village since 2006. We eat in these places. Where we do not know something, a current price, a current opening time, this page says so rather than guessing, because a confident wrong answer about a restaurant is worse than no answer.
The honest picture, before the list
Three things are true about eating in Gulmarg, and almost nobody says them.
The scene is small and mostly hotel-based. Gulmarg is a Himalayan village at the end of a mountain road, not a resort town. There are a handful of independent places and a larger number of hotel restaurants. Most visitors eat breakfast and dinner where they sleep, and that is not a compromise, it is how the village works, and properties here tend to feed guests genuinely well.
Options thin out sharply in a storm. This is the part that catches people out. When it is snowing hard, walking across the village at night stops being casual, some places do not open, and the ones that do are busy. On a big storm night, your hotel dining room is the plan. If it does not serve dinner, that is a problem you want to have solved in October, not on the night.
Après-ski here is not what the phrase implies. There is no bar scene, no lift-side terrace, no crowd. What there is: a hot shower, a pot of kahwa, dinner, and being asleep by ten because you are skiing again at eight. That is genuinely one of the better versions of a ski week, but it is not Austria, and you should know that before you arrive expecting it.
If you want a village with a nightlife, Gulmarg is the wrong choice and it is better to find that out now. If you want to ski hard, eat well and sleep, it is close to ideal.
Where to eat in Gulmarg, at a glance
| What you want | Where |
|---|---|
| A proper sit-down dinner | Highlands Park |
| A bar | Highlands Park |
| Local food in the market | Bakshi Restaurant |
| Pure vegetarian or Jain food | Pandit Dhaba |
| Coffee and a café sit-down | Hotel Lupin |
| Quick food between ski sessions | Gareeb Nawaz. The Northwind Café. White Mountain Café |
| Breakfast and most dinners | Your hotel |
| Lunch while skiing | On the mountain, different page, different problem |
| Formerly recommended, reported closed | Black Bear Brew |
Highlands Park: the best sit-down restaurant in Gulmarg
If you want one proper restaurant meal in Gulmarg, this is the one.
Highlands Park is an established hotel restaurant and the strongest option in the village for sitting down to a real dinner rather than grabbing something. It is well known among skiers, and a good number of the people eating there on any given night are staying somewhere else.
Why it works:
- An established hotel kitchen rather than an improvised one
- A comfortable indoor setting, which matters more than it sounds in February
- Suitable for a proper lunch or a proper dinner
- It has a bar: see below, because that is not a given here
- Worth the walk even if you are staying elsewhere
Highlands Park also appears on our premium hotels page as a property, where the food is one of the reasons it earns its place.
The bar, and alcohol in Gulmarg generally
Highlands Park having a bar makes it one of the more complete evening options in the village, and it is worth understanding why that is notable.
Alcohol is not widely available in Gulmarg. A small number of licensed hotel bars serve it; most places do not, and there is no equivalent of walking out to find a drink.
The practical version: if having a drink after skiing matters to you, check whether your hotel serves alcohol at the time you book. Do not assume, and do not plan on buying it in the village.
For skiers coming off the hill, the useful thing about Highlands Park is that dinner and a drink are in the same building. In a place where moving around the village at night in deep snow is a real consideration, that is worth more than it would be anywhere else.
Bakshi Restaurant: the market option
In the main Gulmarg market, near the Gulmarg Police Station.
That wayfinding matters, because addresses in Gulmarg are effectively useless and the police station is a landmark everybody can find.
Bakshi is a local market restaurant rather than a hotel dining room, and that is the point of it. If you are already in the market, sorting out gear, buying something, waiting for someone, it is the practical place to eat without walking back to your hotel.
What to expect: straightforward local food in a straightforward setting. It is not trying to be Highlands Park and you should not arrive expecting it to be.
Pandit Dhaba: vegetarian and Jain food
The place to know if you need pure vegetarian food, and the only realistic starting point for Jain food in Gulmarg.
It is a basic local establishment rather than a restaurant in the Highlands Park sense. For most visitors that would be a mark against it. If your requirement is dietary rather than culinary, it is not the point.
Worth being precise here, because these are three different things:
Vegetarian is straightforward in Gulmarg. Kashmiri cuisine is meat-heavy, mutton in particular, but every kitchen here handles vegetarian food routinely, and some of the best Kashmiri dishes are vegetarian to begin with: haak, nadru, dum aloo, rajma.
Pure vegetarian, in the sense of a kitchen with no meat in it at all, is a narrower requirement and that is what Pandit Dhaba answers.
Jain is narrower again, no root vegetables, which rules out onion, garlic, potato and ginger, and that removes the base of most Indian cooking. If you follow a strict Jain diet, explain exactly what you need before you order, not after. Preparation practices vary, and a kitchen that has agreed to "Jain food" in good faith may not mean by it what you mean by it. Being specific is not rude here; it is the only thing that works.
Vegan is the genuinely difficult one, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise. Dairy is everywhere in Kashmiri cooking, ghee, curd, paneer, milk in the tea. Vegan is manageable with notice and considerably harder to arrange on the day. If you are vegan, tell your accommodation at booking, and expect to eat more simply than you would at home. This is the same advice we give on our packages pages, and it applies more strongly to eating out than to eating in.
Hotel Lupin: the café
For coffee and a sit-down that is not a full meal, Hotel Lupin is the café option in the village.
It suits the gap most visitors have on day three: you have skied in the morning, you do not want a restaurant lunch, and you want to sit somewhere warm with a coffee for an hour before going back out or going back to the hotel.
What happened to Black Bear Brew?
Black Bear Brew was for several years the café recommendation in Gulmarg. It is reported closed as of the [SEASON] season.
This matters because older travel guides, blog posts and forum threads still list it as open, and aggregator listings for it are still live, which is normal for a closed seasonal business, since almost nobody removes them.
If you find Black Bear Brew recommended somewhere, check its current status before you plan around it.
Reported closed based on local knowledge as of September 2026. If you find it trading again, tell us and we will update this page.
Quick food between ski sessions
Three options for when you do not want a sit-down meal, which on a good snow day is most days.
Gareeb Nawaz, quick food, useful when you want to eat and get on.
The Northwind Café, casual, works for both a light meal and a coffee.
White Mountain Café, the same category; quick food and casual dining.
You can usually ask for what you want
One genuinely useful thing about the quick-food places: they will generally make something the way you want it, within what the kitchen can do. More rice, no chilli, eggs at an odd hour, something to take with you.
That flexibility is worth more to a skier than a printed menu is. On a powder day you do not want a forty-minute lunch, you want something hot, fast and filling so you can get back on the gondola.
If you have a dietary requirement, confirm it directly rather than relying on a menu description. Small kitchens will accommodate you if you ask clearly.
Kashmiri food worth eating while you are here
The venue question is only half of it. You are in Kashmir, and the food is one of the genuine reasons to be here.
Kahwa. Green tea with saffron, cardamom, cinnamon and almonds. It is the drink of the place and it is exactly right after a cold day. Have it at your hotel, have it everywhere.
Noon chai. Salt tea, pink from the way it is brewed. It divides visitors sharply. Try it once, it is more of a Kashmiri breakfast staple than a novelty.
Rogan josh, yakhni, rista, gushtaba. The mutton dishes Kashmir is known for. Yakhni is the yoghurt-based one and the gentlest introduction.
Haak and nadru. Collard greens, and lotus stem. Both vegetarian, both properly Kashmiri, and both far more interesting than the paneer dish you would default to.
The bread. Kashmiri bakery bread, girda, lavasa, tsochvoru, eaten with noon chai in the morning. If your hotel serves it, take it over the toast.
One thing to understand about Wazwan
Wazwan is not a dish and it is not something you order at eight in the evening.
It is a multi-course ceremonial feast, traditionally dozens of courses, mostly mutton, eaten communally, and it is prepared by a specialist cook over many hours. It has to be arranged in advance, and it is a serious quantity of food.
Plenty of travel content lists Wazwan under "what to eat in Gulmarg" as though it were on a menu. It is not. If you want the experience, ask your accommodation well ahead of your trip and expect it to be a planned event rather than a dinner.
Eating on a ski day: what actually works
You do not need to eat at the same place every day, and the rhythm that works here is straightforward.
Breakfast at your hotel to ski to quick lunch to ski to back, shower, rest to proper dinner to sleep.
On a powder day, compress the middle. Fresh snow does not last, the gondola queue does not get shorter, and an hour spent at lunch is an hour of the best skiing of your trip. Quick food, or something carried.
On a rest day or a wind-hold day, take the long dinner. When Phase 2 is on hold there is nowhere urgent to be, and that is the evening for Highlands Park.
Lunch while you are actually on the mountain is a different problem with a different answer, what is open at Kongdoori, what is realistically available at the top station, and whether to carry your own. That is covered on Eating on the Mountain.
Why dinner matters more here than you think
After six or seven hours in cold air at altitude, a proper evening meal stops being a pleasure and becomes part of the trip working.
Skiing here burns more than people budget for, learning, skiing powder, touring, hiking for a line, riding continuously through the day. Cold adds to it. Altitude adds to it again.
Two things go wrong on multi-day trips, and both are avoidable:
Not eating enough. Day-three fatigue is very often a calorie deficit accumulated over two days, not a fitness problem. Eat properly in the evening even when you are too tired to want to.
Not drinking enough. Dry cold air and altitude dehydrate you faster than the temperature suggests, and a meaningful share of what people experience as day-three exhaustion is dehydration. You will not feel thirsty. Drink anyway.
Our guides raise this at the morning briefing more often than any other non-safety topic, because it is the most common reason a strong skier has a poor fourth day.
Practical points nobody publishes
Cash. Assume cash for the smaller places. This is a real planning question and no ski operator in this market answers it.
Walking in ski boots. Some places you can walk into straight off the hill; others are a change-your-footwear trip.
After a heavy snowfall, distance changes. A five-minute walk in November is a different proposition after 40 cm overnight, in the dark, with no pavement. Plan the evening around where you are staying rather than around where you fancy eating.
Hotel half-board is usually the right call. If your accommodation includes breakfast and dinner, take it. Eating out every night in Gulmarg is neither convenient nor especially rewarding, and on the two or three nights you do want to go out, you can. See Where to Stay in Gulmarg for which properties do this well.
Tell people about dietary requirements at booking, not on arrival. Vegetarian is fine on the day. Vegan, gluten-free, allergies and medical diets need notice, and Gulmarg does not have a wide field of restaurants to fall back on.
Eating in Gulmarg: the short version
Gulmarg does not have a big restaurant scene, and it does not need one for a ski trip to work.
For a proper dinner: Highlands Park, which also has the bar. In the market: Bakshi Restaurant, near the police station. Pure vegetarian or Jain: Pandit Dhaba, with your requirements explained clearly up front. Coffee: Hotel Lupin. Black Bear Brew, which older guides still recommend, is reported closed. Quick food: Gareeb Nawaz, The Northwind Café, White Mountain Café. Most mornings and most evenings: wherever you are staying, and that is how it should be.
Good breakfast to ski hard to quick lunch to ski again to proper dinner to sleep to repeat.
That is the week, and the food is a bigger part of whether it goes well than most people expect.
Planning a ski trip to Gulmarg
We have guided and taught here since 2006 and can help with the parts around the food as well as the food itself.
Gulmarg Snowkings, founded 2006 by Shafat Ahmad Tantray and Bashir Ahmad Mir. J&K Tourism registered ski school and backcountry guiding operator, permit JKAT00005678, backcountry team certified through AIARE, Avalanche Canada and the Kashmir Avalanche Association, 2,500+ skiers guided from 40+ countries, zero avalanche accidents among our guided clients since 2006.
Questions about a trip, or a dietary requirement you want sorted before you arrive: +91-9596300570, phone or WhatsApp.
Also useful: Eating on the Mountain, Where to Stay in Gulmarg, Ski & Snowboard Lessons in Gulmarg, Gulmarg Ski Guides, Ski Packages, Best Time to Ski in Gulmarg