Where should I eat in Pokhara, and which local food or drink is worth trying?

Lakeside is not a neighborhood so much as a feeding system: a mile of restaurants along the lake's eastern shore, organized by numbered side streets, where trekking groups carb-load before the trails and celebrate after them. The plate to order first is the Thakali thali. The Thakali people come from Thak Khola, the stretch of the Kali Gandaki valley below Mustang, and their set meal — rice or a buckwheat dhido, black dal, gundruk, seasonal greens, meat curry, pickles and a spoon of ghee — is the Annapurna region's own cuisine, served by the Thakali kitchens clustered around Lakeside's Middle Path and 15th and 16th Streets, where houses like Thakali Maya and Kutumba Kitchen refill the brass bowls until you stop them. It is the natural dinner after a day walking: protein, fermented sourness and heat in fixed proportions.

The lake itself supplies the second specialty. Phewa and Begnas both support working fisheries, and the lakefront restaurants grill, fry and curry the day's catch — order the fish whole and fried with a squeeze of lemon and a local salad, eaten at a terrace table while the boats come in. Momo fill the gaps between meals everywhere: steamed or fried, buffalo, chicken or vegetable, and in jhol form, drowned in a cold, spicy sesame-and-tomato soup that is Pokhara's favorite afternoon snack. The strip also runs long-lived comfort institutions for the trekking trade — the Maya Pub, in its 26th year on Lakeside, is where guides and returning climbers have debriefed over thalis and cold drinks for a generation — and the bakeries along the main road exist because a thousand trekkers a week demand banana bread and cinnamon rolls before dawn starts.

Leave Lakeside once, for the old town. Around Mahendrapool and Bhimsen Tol, Pokhara's original bazaar keeps the older rhythm: tea stalls pouring sweet spiced chiya, sel roti rings frying in wide pans for the morning crowd, and Newari snack counters serving the valley's spiced potatoes and beaten rice. The drink to bring home in your habits is Mustang's: Marpha, up the Kali Gandaki, is famous across Nepal for its apples, and its apple brandy and dried-apple rings are sold throughout Pokhara — the mountain valley's orchard, bottled, at the end of the trekking road.

A Lakeside terrace at seven in the evening: the lake gone pewter, paraglider pilots packing wings on the grass strip, and a brass thali arriving in sections — dal poured, greens placed, ghee melting a crater into the rice — while the waiter hovers to refill anything that empties.

The Thakali thali is a refill system, not a serving. The first round is deliberately modest; the kitchen expects to come back twice with rice, dal and greens, and judges your satisfaction by what you accept on the second pass. Travelers who pace themselves as if the first plate were the whole meal leave the best part — the cook's response to a proven appetite — unordered.

• Breakfast — Sel roti and chiya at an old-bazaar tea stall, or bakery coffee on Lakeside before a dawn start.
• Lunch — Jhol momo or a light lake-fish plate between sights, keeping the afternoon walkable.
• Dinner — The full Thakali thali at a side-street kitchen off Lakeside, with the refills, after the day's viewpoint is done.

Lakeside prices run well above the old town's for identical dishes, and the lakefront terraces charge for the view as much as the fish — the Thakali houses a street or two back are the better value. Fish supply follows the lake's seasons and the catch, so a promised specialty can simply not exist on a slow day; order what the kitchen says came in. During the October peak, the best-known tables fill by seven, and a lakeside dinner without a short wait means eating early or walking further along the strip.

Pick one Thakali house on the numbered side streets for the first night's dinner, and let the lake choose the second night's fish.