Meet the folks shaping Kolkata's food and drinks scene
Chefs and mixologists are taking inspiration from Bengal's diverse food culture, and combining it with global ideas to bring fresh energy into the dining out scene
Kolkata has a storied food culture, yet the city is often accused of being nostalgia-drunk, unadventurous, notoriously price conscious and reluctant to embrace the new, unlike Mumbai and Delhi. Until a few years ago, eating out here usually meant a trip to Park Street vintages like Mocambo or Peter Cat, Tangra favourites serving Chinese food or good-old biryani joints. Although new restaurants opened, not many survived.
Over the last three to four years, though, there has been a proliferation of restaurants and cafés in residential neighbourhoods, in heritage buildings, and on rooftops overlooking some of the city’s best views. National chains like Social Restaurants and the Olive Group have finally opened. But what is truly exciting is the homegrown culinary culture that’s taking shape, riding on the vision and creativity of entrepreneurs who have trained and travelled around the world to bring home fresh ideas.
“Kolkata’s food scene has grown more confident and self-assured," says chef Rituparna Banerjee, who, along with husband Avinandan, runs Curry Fwd Collaborations, a culinary consulting company started in 2019. “Chefs and bartenders are expressing their voices, producers and artisans are spotlighting local ingredients, and restaurateurs are daring to launch niche experiential concepts. Most importantly, guests are showing up with curiosity and excitement," she says.
A few months ago, the Banerjees opened Nutcase Etc, a cocktail parlour tucked inside a century-old building in Kalighat in south Kolkata. They’ve put a spin on typical Calcutta bar food like dim sheddho (boiled eggs) and badam bhaja (fried peanuts) and distilled the flavours of everything from rare steak to chilli chicken into cocktails.
Award-winning mixologist Subhobrata Majumder, who mans the bar at the Greek-themed Brewery Olterra on Middleton Row, has also noticed the change. “Kolkata doesn’t have the cosmopolitan crowds and migrant populations that Mumbai and Delhi have. It won’t do to simply follow global trends. It needs to script its own vocabulary to stand out." His In Search of Bengal menu, which catapulted Olterra into the 30 Best Bars list 2024, features gundruk (fermented greens from the eastern Himalayas), Kalimpong cheese from North Bengal and mangrove bitters from the Sundarbans.
One of the most resolute champions of local produce is perhaps chef Auroni Mookerji, who spotlighted the food and ingredients of Kolkata’s bazars at Sienna, the restaurant which he left a couple of years ago to work on other projects. He will be opening a “chef-bar" at the prime junction of Camac Street and Park Street later this year. “At the heart of it will be a charcoal fire section inspired by the grill and barbecue traditions of the East—Saigon, Hong Kong and Seoul," says Mookerji, who is also scouting for a space to open a restaurant that he plans to call St Park, his ode to Park Street.
Sienna is now in the hands of chefs Koyel Roy Nandy and Avinandan Kundu. Nandy, who has worked at The Oberoi Kolkata and chef Ritu Dalmia’s Diva in Delhi, says the team will go beyond Kolkata to explore other districts of Bengal, and spotlight ingredients like kulthi-r daal or horsegram and small fish that usually don’t make it to restaurant menus. For Durga Puja, Nandy has put foraged greens like shyapla or waterlilly stem and kochu shaak or taro stem on the menu.
There’s also Conversation Room that opened in November last year, co-founded by restaurateur Abhimanyu Maheshwari. Housed in a heritage building in Chowringhee and devoid of thumping music, it’s a space meant for conversation over innovative cocktails infused with the five-spice mix panchphoron, souring agent kokum and even curry leaves. The menu includes sandos, sliders, egg curry and pot roast.
“Over time, it has evolved into a space that can shift from hosting lectures by professors and public intellectuals under our ‘Class-Room’ series, to once a month night of ‘Not-A-Conversation-Room’, where we break our own rules, and end the night with people dancing atop tables," says Maheshwari.
Places like these also collaborate and host events with bars and restaurants across the country and the world.
Curated meals, supper clubs and other bespoke dining experiences are also on the rise. Anishka Bose, a Culinary Arts Academy, Switzerland alumnus, opened the doors to her ancestral home on Dr SN Roy Road in March, to host her supper club Salud. Held twice every weekend, she hosts 12 people at a time. Her tasting menus are steeped in storytelling. For instance, The Director’s Table menu is a tribute to her great-grandfather, filmmaker Debaki Bose, and she serves dishes such as beguni crisps with avocado velouté and mango tiramisu to honour his love for mangoes.
Meanwhile, Argha Sen, a former marketing and advertising professional, hosts immersive dining experiences through collaborations with chefs via Gormei, which he launched in Hong Kong in 2017, and now operates from Kolkata. Gormei has hosted award-winning Hong Kong-based bartender Beckaly Franks for a bar takeover in the cocktail spot AMPM in Kolkata, and flew down Cambodian chef Ros Rotanak to give the city a taste of a cuisine that was almost obliterated by a genocide.
One of his collaborations since 2021 has been with Katherine Lim, a third-generation Chinese Indian of Hakka descent, who started out as a home chef. With Gormei, she has cooked at Masque Lab in Mumbai and Honk in Delhi, where she served dishes like roast crackling pork and soy-braised chicken—a far cry from the soy-stained, wok-tossed noodles strewn with slivers of colourful vegetables that has long represented Hakka cuisine in the city’s collective imagination. Lim serves what she calls global Hakka food.
“The Hakka diaspora is spread across the globe from Mauritius to Peru, and the cuisine has picked up distinct inflections in all the different places," says Lim. An example is the yam abacus beads, a gnocchi-like dish she came across in the Hakka community in Singapore, and served recently in the city.
But, she can also cook a mean chilli chicken. What is Kolkata, anyway, without its chilli chicken?
Priyadarshini Chatterjee is a food and culture writer who divides her time between Kolkata and Mumbai.
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