Bebena, Thimphu – The newest restaurant in town accepts customers only with prior booking. This is because Sonam, 33, who started this small Italian restaurant, is the owner-chef-waitress-cleaner – all in one – running the restaurant almost single-handedly. And, she makes the pasta all day long.

“Yes, it is just me and my cousin,” she says, adding that there is a limit to how much a person can make in a day. And so, she makes depending on how many have booked for the day.

Besides, she doesn’t buy industrial products. For obvious reasons, I guess. Good Italian restaurants around the world promote homemade fresh pastas. Fast food is frowned upon by lovers of Italian cuisine, and factory food is never good enough for a chef.

The small joint in Thimphu is named Sole, which means the Sun in Italian, and is located at Bebena across the football field. It undoubtedly serves the best Italian food in town with a slight Bhutanese fix with yak meat and local chilli.

Sonam is one of the few young Bhutanese who returned home – leaving behind a career abroad – in Italy to be precise, where after a course in culinary arts she interned in a Michelin-starred restaurant in Milan, landed a permanent position as a chef and quickly rose up the ladder. She is a Thimphu-native both by ancestry and by birth, and left the country when she turned 18. She lived and worked in Australia before going on a holiday to Italy, falling in love with the country and planting there for close to seven years.

“I miss Italy. You must be too, right? The people are lovely, the food is great, the country is beautiful” Sonam tells me with a huge nostalgia.

“Yes! That’s the place I would go back to any day,” I reply. (I lived in Italy for a little over 8 years – doing my long university studies in the nineties).

“And why did you come back? You had a secured job,” I ask Sonam.

“In short, my mom called me back. It is time to come home, she said,” Sonam says with a smile.

“Of course, as you know, life in Italy is good, but there is no place like Bhutan. When I came back I realised what I had missed – those simple things in life like barging into a relative’s house unannounced, and demand some tea. Or families sitting together on the floor for dinner, and the loving presence of my mom and my grannies. No amount of money can match these feelings. And no matter how close I was with my friends and colleagues abroad I could never be spontaneous or natural”.

Sonam returned home last year and worked on building her restaurant, which she finally opened in September 2025.

“It has a short menu, only a few things I can do myself, but which I try to do well. It’s been doing OK. I wasn’t sure if people would like the taste of homemade pasta and ragu made from yak meat,” she says with pride.

My second time at Sole was even better. She gave me one of my favourite Italian desserts – mele al forno – caramel baked apple with ice cream topping.