Old City Breakfast · Fried Bread & Curry

Halwa Puri

Photo: Tahsin Shah / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

Lahore's oldest halwa puri shops in the Walled City serve the dish only in the morning — several famous stalls fry their last puri and shut the stove before lunchtime even begins.

A plate of halwa puri layers three parts eaten together: puffy deep-fried bread (puri), a spiced chickpea curry (choley), and a sweet semolina halwa. Stalls in Lahore's Walled City fry the puri to order and ladle the curry from huge pots for a breakfast plate meant to be torn apart by hand.

Why it's made this way: The combination became a fixture of Lahore's Old City food streets, where fried bread, curried chickpeas and sweet semolina share one plate as a single breakfast rather than three separate courses.