Hotel Giri Ganga Dhaba at Sainj Kenchi, Himachal Pradesh

Giri Ganga Hotel and Restaurant Sainj Kenchi is a uniquely placed enterprise given its location.

The road to shimla via theog & kufri

Hotel Giri Ganga is located at the trisection of Solan Bypass, the Shimla Highway and the Road that leads to Kharapathar and onwards to our destination Chanshal Pass.

The Sainj Kenchi market where it stands is a part of the local bus stand.

Apart from Giri Ganga Dhaba, the market has one more and quite claustrophobic restaurant and bar by the name of Bhandari Restaurant & Bar.

The surprising part about Bhandari Restaurant & Bar is that it doesn’t have much traffic despite serving non-vegetarian food and alcohol.

As I entered Bhandari Restaurant & Bar first being closer to where our truck was parked, I spotted just two men leaving on their feet and a waiter.

Upon asking the waiter or the attendant couldn’t even answer basic questions like what dishes were available and kept looking all around with his small Nepali eyes.

I think his response would have been different if I asked what brands of alcohol he had in stock.

Maybe he didn’t understand me or was caught unaware of how could four men descend at his unmentionable pale, nondescript and dirty restaurant bar that he was unmanaging.

So, his luck and our truck both moved down the road to the dining hall of Hotel Giri Ganga.

Hotel giri ganga, sainj kenchi, himachal pradesh

So the building has three floors but you can see only two from the photo. The third floor is a basement that has rooms for lodging.

The ground floor comprises of the Dining Hall, Kitchen, a Washroom and a shop selling wares of all kinds. The washroom isn’t easy to find, so you must ask if it is your first visit.

It is in an antechamber right under the stairs and you can’t find it unless the server at the dhaba directs you to open the door leading to it. Once you enter the space, you’ll never forget this washroom in your life.

In my opinion, this is a very inconvenient entry to a public convenience and so is the space that shakes, when you are doing your business. However, we all survived this shaky sojourn.

We finally reached and sat down for lunch in this dining hall that had some fifteen tables with four chairs each. All of which were empty.

That is what in their opinion makes a restaurant different from a dhaba, at least their dhaba. They even have a page on Facebook where Hotel Giri Ganga with its four rooms is listed as a Resort.

The rear of the hall where we deposited ourselves had a magnificent view of a mountaintop with the river Giri Ganga flowing through the valley at the bottom. The view is indeed surreal.

We browsed through this one-page menu and took our own sweet time to place the order. Imagine four adult men not being able to make up their minds about food from a one-page menu half of which was blank.

Finally, we arrived at our order decision comprising half a thali each of Rajma Chawal, one portion of Jeera Aloo and one portion of Sweet Himachali Siddu with Ghee.

It was not easy hence, you can’t imagine ht process in which there were many deliberations involved to arrive at this decision.

We relayed our order softly to the server who barked it out to the kitchen and the first step of the lunch process was complete and then we started waiting.