There is no menu. The food is Bikaneri - heavy on the gram flour and the ghee, cooked slowly, and better than anything you will be served in a hotel dining room in the district. If someone at your table does not eat meat, or cannot eat wheat, say so at the enquiry stage and the kitchen works around it.

The evening runs about three hours. You arrive at seven while it is still light enough to see the courtyard, the family shows you the rooms that are theirs rather than a museum version of them, and dinner comes out in courses that are not announced. Conversation is the point; if you want a quiet dinner for two this is the wrong arrangement.

Only one table goes out an evening, so the date decides everything. October to March only - the courtyard is open to the sky and unusable in the heat — and we usually need a month, longer over Christmas and in February.