What are the opening hours?

Wednesday 5pm - 9:30pm Thursday 5pm - 9:30pm Friday 5pm - 9pm Saturday 12pm - 3pm 5pm - 9:30pm Sunday 12pm - 3pm 5pm - 9:30pm

Taste Tibet

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Taste Tibet

Oxford's legendary Tibetan restaurant and food stall, serving the the best momo dumplings, curry and Tibetan chai tea this side of the Himalayas.

Find us at 109 Magdalen Road OX4 1RQ and at festivals and events across the land. Recommended by The Guardian in its Top Ten Budget Restaurants and Cafes in Oxford, as well as by Time Out and the BBC Good Food Magazine, Taste Tibet is Oxford's legendary comfort food destination. In 2021 we were finalists in the Best Street Food/Takeaway category of the BBC Food and Farming Awards. Our new home at

109 Magdalen Road in East Oxford is currently open for lunch and dinner Wednesday-Saturday (NB Weds is dinner only). Come for our mouthwatering momo dumplings, hearty Himalayan curries and wicked chai tea. You can also find us at festivals around the land: Glastonbury, Latitude, Green Man, Cambridge Folk, the Hay-on-Wye Literature Festival and many more! We cater at lots of the Oxford and Cambridge university college balls as well. Our takeaway food is served in recyclable and compostable packaging and we are committed to the lowest possible environmental footprint. Check out our website www.tastetibet.com for more pictures and info, come and see us in our restaurant, or get in touch if you would like to hire us for your special event. For more information, read our story as told by the Oxford Mail: http://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/life/11646356.A_story_of_love_and_Tibetan_dumplings/

See also Taste Tibet in Time Out:

https://www.timeout.com/oxford/restaurants/best-restaurants-in-oxford

and The Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2014/nov/19/top-10-budget-restaurants-cafes-oxford

15/07/2026

On a sunny Friday evening in July fifteen years ago today, Yeshi arrived in the U.K. Tonight we are celebrating with football and beer, the English way 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 Here is our story.

14/07/2026

In 1980s Tibet, the closest Yeshi ever got to a game of sports was the turnip patch.

Turnips were good value: you could bat them with a piece of wood, roll them down the hill, play catch with them. They also made excellent wheels if you wanted to build yourself a mini tractor.

Yeshi’s childhood was full of play, but organised sports – even just a proper ball – were not available to him.

Until he was about ten, that is. That summer he went to visit relatives in a nearby valley. His cousin had a basketball, and Yeshi had so much fun with it that he let him take it home.

Yeshi loved that basketball but there weren’t any hoops back in his village so there were limits to what he could do with it. It got thrown around inside the family home, and after a few breakages, he stopped playing with it.

In Tibet, objects gathering dust tend to be put to use in other ways. Having long spied the ball’s potential as a useful pair of feeding troughs for his horses, Yeshi’s dad eventually cut it in two.

Some years later, after Yeshi had walked over the Himalayas to his new home in India, he joined the school basketball team (can you spot him in the picture?). Here he experienced the thrill of competition for the first time.

He turns out to be pretty good at any game he turns his hand to. As a child in Tibet he’d never heard of football or tennis, but as a dad in the UK he’s given everything his best shot. Mostly, though, he’s a keen spectator.

Our house has been buzzing with World Cup action these last few weeks. Late at night, after he’s got in from work, Yeshi can be heard shouting at the TV through the floorboards. He’s a natural supporter of the underdog, an experience to which he can relate.

A couple of weeks ago, Yeshi took the kids to watch the tennis at Queen’s. This Sunday he and his brother Nyima are back in London for a one-day international at Lord’s. These are big occasions – they’re the first time that either of our chefs have ever attended a live game. They’re making up for lost time.

All of which is a long way of saying that the restaurant will wind up for a summer of festivals this coming Saturday night, a day earlier than we might have planned, as Yeshi and Nyima are off to the cricket.

Make sure you join us this weekend. The Rusty Bicycle is holding their annual street party on Saturday, with live music starting at 12pm. We can’t think of a better way to close out our summer on Magdalen Road.

If you want to keep tabs us during the nomadic summer months, make sure you’re subscribed to Postcards From Tibet, link in comments. As usual, we’ll be taking you behind the scenes at all our favourite festivals.

This week’s opening hours are as follows:

Fri: 5-9.30pm (dinner only)
Saturday: 12-3 / 5-9.30pm

Our menu is up on the website – check it. Come by for dine in or take away, and be sure to clear space in your freezers before your visit as this is your last chance to stock up on freezer food until September. Sepen chilli oil is also available – get it while you can.

Looking forward to seeing you soon for one last blast of summer!

Julie and Yeshi

07/07/2026

This is the first picture I ever took of Yeshi. He didn’t know I was taking it, but I wasn’t entirely stalking him either. We had met a few hours before on a mountain path in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas.

Yeshi was a Tibetan refugee. He’d been living in India for ten years and was studying English and photography in Dharamsala at the time. I was a tourist with a few days to spare in his adopted home town.

We’d never have met if it wasn’t for the monkeys. Not the cheeky, pickpocketing ones you find everywhere in India, but large, leaf-eating langurs. Yeshi calls them snow monkeys.

Snow monkeys move around according to the season. In winter, when leaves, fruits and flowers become scarce at high altitude they descend into the town, feeding off bark, buds and plant stems.

Click the link in the comments to see the very monkeys that got us into conversation. Knowing them to be shy creatures, Yeshi went in with his camera for a close-up. Looking for a better shot myself, I followed him.

Now many of you know Yeshi to be a big guy hardly lacking in swagger: he’s the self-styled King of Dharamsala. But let’s be clear – what really sold me was his food.

That evening, after he’d guided me around the scenic, circular trail that loops around His Holiness XIV Dalai Lama’s temple, he cooked me dinner.

On the menu was beef thenthuk. This was my first time savouring the hand-pulled noodles that have since become a staple in our family home. I didn’t know then the story of how he’d learned to cook this dish in the yak-hair tent that his family lived in on the grasslands during summertime.

But I did know that I could slurp this soup forever, and that made this man a keeper.

This weekend the kitchen team at St. Catherine’s College in Oxford are cooking up beef thenthuk for two hundred participants of the Oxford Food Symposium, the oldest-established and most respected conference of its kind.

As guest chefs, Yeshi and I are overseeing the lunch. We’re incredibly proud to showcase Tibetan food on such a prestigious stage. As far as we’re aware, this is the first time the cuisine has ever had such a grand billing.

Taking thenthuk out of the yak-hair tent and into Oxford’s largest college is a spectacular full-circle moment for us. It’s also timely. Tibet needs representation more than ever right now. We’re here to serve.

IMPORTANT NOTICE! The restaurant will be open for two more weekends before our regular summer closure. This week’s opening hours are as follows:

Fri: 5-9.30pm (dinner only)
Saturday: 21-3/ 5-9.30pm
Sunday: 12-3 / 5-9pm

Our menu is up on the website – check it. Come for dine in or take away. We also have excellent stocks of sepen chilli oil and freezer food, so make sure you come in and load up before doors close.

Oh, and iced chai will be back. If you’re a newsletter subscriber we’re actually gifting it to you this week. Click the link in the comments to sign up.

Looking forward to seeing you soon,

Julie and Yeshi

03/07/2026

Quick reminder that the restaurant is CLOSED THIS WEEKEND. We’re just back from a wonderful couple of days at Groundswell and I’d like to say we’re resting up but we’re actually heading north to Leicester tomorrow to cater a friend’s 8️⃣0️⃣th 🎈Enjoy the sunshine, folks, and see you next Friday ☀️

01/07/2026

Oxford peeps! Sorry but the restaurant is CLOSED this week while we’re out serving the good people of Groundswell Agriculture. And what a brilliant first night - thanks to all the truly lovely people who ate with us 🥟🥟 Lots of hugely inspiring talks and events upcoming - we will try and squeeze into the audience at some point!

30/06/2026

For a Tibetan chef, the greatest fear is the food running out.

Much of this is cultural. In Tibet, as elsewhere in Asia, the practice of preparing and cooking food is a love language, arguably the highest of its kind.

But for Tibetans it’s also deeply tangible, with periods of scarcity still within recent memory. Yeshi’s brother Nyima, who’s almost 15 years his senior, is old enough to remember the aftermath of the Great Chinese Famine (1958-1962), widely recognised as one of the most catastrophic man-made disasters in modern history.

When Yeshi was growing up in 1980s Tibet, food continued to be in limited supply. Meat was a rarity, and fruit and veg were impossible to come by outside of their season.

Moving to India as a young adult (pictured), he was less satisfied still. Without family to look out for him, and with few pennies in his pocket, he often felt hungry.

Happily, feeding the big guy is no longer an issue. Now he’s built himself a restaurant to ensure that food is always available. But these experiences have their own legacy, and they’ve shaped our family life as well as our business.

When friends come to the house for dinner, he pushes the boat out. There may be just a couple of extra people at the table, but he’ll cook like he’s invited everyone on the street.

At Taste Tibet, the same applies. On a regular Wednesday night Yeshi will prep for weekend numbers. When a college orders a thousand portions of momos for their ball, he’ll throw in an extra hundred just because.

Don’t worry – our tendency to over-cater does not lead to waste. Visitors to our home will always get a doggy bag. Restaurant leftovers make their way into the display freezer – you can buy them at a discounted price. And as for those surplus momos, since when did students ever turn down a little extra?

In Tibet, throwing food away is just not a thing. Last night’s noodles are perfect as today’s breakfast. Stir-fried scraps can be fashioned into a new dish, even more delicious second time around. In the last resort, the pigs will eat anything.

At the restaurant, we’re always delighted when customers ask us to bag up what they can’t finish (and there are often leftovers – try as I might, I cannot get Chef Nyima to reduce the size of those biryanis). We’re so happy that pretty much everyone takes home what they cannot manage in one sitting.

If this model sounds like something we should see more of on the high street, do share this post. Taste Tibet has won multiple awards, and we’re always happy to talk sustainability with other cafés and restaurants.

*TASTE TIBET IS CLOSED THIS WEEK* – we’re away catering at Groundswell. The restaurant will be back open on Friday 10th July with just a couple of weekends left to see us before we shut for a summer of festivals. Make sure you don’t miss our open/closed updates – our Substack is a great place to keep up to date. Link in comments.

Have a great weekend – sorry we’re away – and we look forward to seeing you soon.

Julie and Yeshi

26/06/2026

❗️IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT❗️Taste Tibet is open tonight and this weekend, but will be CLOSED all through next week. Make sure you come and see us before this brief hiatus! We’re running with this momolicious menu of favourites and have plenty of outdoor space for momos and a Lucky Buddha Beer al fresco. Also warmly recommending our ICED CHAI right now, cannot begin to describe how perfect this is. Run, don’t walk🏃🏻‍♀️

23/06/2026

How did Taste Tibet get to be Tilda Swinton’s top food pick at Glastonbury?

In the week that the festival usually kicks off (it’s not happening this year – it’s a fallow one) we’ve been looking back, and honestly – this wasn’t in our stars.

When I was little we were not a festival-going family. My main frame of reference for Glastonbury was my posh mum lamenting the state of the portaloos. But she was just going off images from the TV – we were definitely not experiencing them first hand.

As for Yeshi, in his own childhood he could not have conceived of a world like Glastonbury. He spent his summers out on the Tibetan Plateau with just his yaks and sheep for company. He never encountered big crowds until he landed in India as a young adult.

Fittingly, our first visit to Worthy Farm was all thanks to His Holiness XIV Dalai Lama. It was just before he turned 80, and – bizarrely – he made a stop at Glastonbury Festival during a short visit to the UK. The Tibetan community were allocated tickets so that we could celebrate his birthday with him.

In the grey glow of the Sunday afternoon, His Holiness made his debut on the Pyramid Stage. Patti Smith brought him on and the crowd sang happy birthday. There was even a cake.

Our kids were 1 and 3 at the time. We were the only parents mad enough to have their toddlers with them in that particular mud-caked field, but we survived, and it emboldened us.

Years later, and veterans by now of many of the UK’s biggest music festivals, Taste Tibet landed our first pitch at Glastonbury. We’ve since become a fixture here, with a prime location and a host of wonderful regulars.

As a family, we’ve enjoyed unsurpassed moments of joy in these fields. Our son has juggled flower sticks at the Stone Circle at sunset. Our daughter has seen her musical heroes and found herself in the middle of a real-life Joe Wicks workout all the space of a day.

Along the way, we’ve also seen the best of humanity, and it’s been amazing to have our kids experience that with us alongside. People helping them into the front row or up onto our shoulders. Litter pickers at sunrise. The kindness of strangers as rarely experienced anywhere else.

Glastonbury – we’ll take those portaloos and crowds any time. This was not the world we were born into but how we miss it in a fallow year.

We’re open again from this Friday. Our full opening hours are as follows:

Fri: 5-9.30pm (dinner only)
Saturday: 21-3/ 5-9.30pm
Sunday: 12-3 / 5-9pm

This week’s menu is up on the website – check it. Come for dine in, take away and excellent stocks of freezer food. And if you haven’t yet tried our iced chai (available for dine in or take away) get ready for a life-changing experience.

Newsletter subscribers enjoy some excellent offers on our freezer meals this week: click the link in comments to unlock all the deals.

And for fully-illustrated newsletters, head over to our Instagram for all the pics!

Looking forward to seeing you soon,

Julie and Yeshi

21/06/2026

Happy Father’s Day to the big guy - our chef, partner in crime, best dad. We 💙 you so much.

19/06/2026

There’s a lot we don’t usually talk about, so many reasons we work as hard as we do. This is one of them.

Address

109 Magdalen Road
Oxford
OX41RQ

Opening Hours

Wednesday	5pm - 9:30pm
Thursday	5pm - 9:30pm
Friday	5pm - 9pm
Saturday	12pm - 3pm
	5pm - 9:30pm
Sunday	12pm - 3pm
	5pm - 9:30pm

Website

http://www.tastetibet.com/

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