More momo, please

Momo Ghar prepares to open new stand-alone restaurant in Dublin

A mere five years ago, before Phuntso Lama and her husband Pramod Lama opened the now scorchingly popular Momo Ghar, not many people knew about the roughly 200 square-foot restaurant nestled into a corner of Saraga International Grocery.

A momo is a spiced, steamed dumpling filled with meat or vegetables and is a popular comfort food in Tibet and Nepal.

The handcrafted momo offered by the Lama family is widely regarded as some of, if not the best in America—less than a year after opening, they were featured on Food Network’s Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives and received a 2017 Yelp award recognizing them as the 38th best restaurant in America.

“There’s been momo served in New York for 20, 30 years; there’s been momo served in DC, in all big cities for 20, 30 years; but nobody made it mainstream like she did,” Pramod said of his wife.

In fact, many of the momo-serving restaurants the Lamas stumble across feature photos of their food, from Momo Ghar.

“A friend of ours went to a food cart in Texas recently that sold momo. She sent us a photo; every picture they used was one of ours. Even the names were the same [as our menu items],” said Phuntso Lama.

But the husband and wife team takes this blatant plagiarism in stride, and with good humor: they share a laugh about it as the three of us talk on a warm, fall Friday just outside the iconic Columbus North Market where Momo Ghar opened a stand.

We’ve met up to discuss one of the more exciting moves happening on the Columbus food scene recently: Momo Ghar preparing to open its third location, a stand-alone restaurant in Dublin, likely at the end of this year.

And while the Lamas admit that COVID has slowed business, it’s apparent they’ve already reached the upper echelon of the city’s restaurant scene, and that their food is in such high demand that very little, not even a pandemic, can stop them from expanding.

We here at (614) are excited. Diners across Columbus are excited. But those most excited for the new restaurant are none other than Pramod and Phuntso Lama themselves.

“She’s been wanting a restaurant for a really long time, and that’s exciting for us,” said Pramod.

And while the opening poses its own unique set of challenges—namely the fact that the Lamas have yet to run a stand-alone eatery—they still haven’t found a culinary obstacle they couldn’t overcome, and they have big plans for the new location.

While Jhol Momo is still likely to be their most popular dish, they’re taking steps to expand their normally smaller menu, and will feature the addition of noodle dishes bringing it to a roughly twenty-item menu.

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The work ahead for the pair is mostly in the form of refurbishing the interior of their new location, 2800 Festival Lane in Dublin, within Festival Centre, which they are handling mostly themselves. To maintain the authentic Tibetan and Nepali aesthetic their locations manage to establish, including a bright, tasteful array of prayer flags and string light, the Lamas are importing more flags, cloth, and other decorations from Nepal.

“One of the things we wanted to do was to hire a professional to help us set up the interior, but then again they’re not Nepali, and they’re not Tibetan,” Pramod Lama said. “That’s the fun part, where we get to create what we want to create and present it to Columbus as our truly Tibetan and Nepali space.”

And while aesthetic is important, really it’s all about the food.

“Cooking is a lot like music, either you have it or you don’t. If I could go to school for music and become Eric Clapton or John Lennon, [I] would do it,” Pramod said. “But she has it. She can taste something once and know what’s in it. She can take ingredients and make them great.”

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