In Rome, do as the Romans do; in Calcutta, do what the Bengalis do – eat Bengali food. Don’t sneer, because this was not an easy thing to do if you were a guest in the city a few decades ago. Those days, if you didn’t have an aunt or two in Calcutta, you wouldn’t even have got a whiff of steamed hilsa or a mixed vegetable dish called chorchori. There were no Bengali restaurants in the city – though you could get your fill of Chinese or Continental food. My Bengali friends then said it was because no restaurant chef could cook the way Bengali mothers did.
I think the answer was simpler. Since Bengali food was available in plenty at home, there was no reason why restaurants would serve potoler dolma (parmal stuffed with fish paste or keema) or shukto (a summer dish of veggies in a light and mildly bitter broth). Then kitchens at home started changing, and dishes that Grandmas cooked became rarer and rarer.
That’s when restaurants with Bengali food started emerging. There was Suruchi, which was a cooperative run by women. Then came other, grander restaurants – Kewpies, Peerless Hotel’s Aaheli and Oh! Calcutta. More followed – namely Bhojohori Manna and 6 Ballygunge Place.
On Monday, I went to a new restaurant while in Calcutta, and was bowled over by its food. I was taken there by my foodie friends, the Mukerjis, who know everything that should be known about Cal food. The place is called Ghare Baire, and it’s on Harish Mukherjee Road (phone numbers -09748272939 and 033-32628326).
I had a look at the menu card and found that almost all the dishes that my Bengali near-and-dear ones go moony-eyed over were on the menu. It even had chitol maachher muittha – an elaborate dish of fish balls in gravy.
For the Bengali New Year, there were special thalis. But we decided to order a wide range of dishes from the general menu. For the four of us, we asked for dal, chorchori, shukto, fried potatoes, topshe fish, hilsa, mutton, chicken and prawns. And each dish, let me tell you, was delicious with a capital D.
We started with the fried topshe fish – small fish which had been crumbed and fried. We had tried cooking it at home once, and it wasn’t much of a success because the delicate fish broke while being fried. This had been fried just right, and was quite a treat.
The entrees came with Gobindbhog rice – a small, fragrant variety. The mung dal had been simply cooked (and was divine once you added just a wee bit of cow’s milk ghee to it). The potatoes were thin and crisp, and went really well with the dal. The chorchori had been cooked with pumpkin, and the shukto had all kinds of veggies such as bitter gourd, plantain and drumsticks.
The steamed hilsa was, in one word, superb. The fish itself was delicious (hilsa can sometimes be tasteless), and the gravy of mustard paste and mustard oil (and some poppy seeds to give it a thicker consistency) was lip-smackingly good. I ate a bit of the fish with almost all of the gravy, and then tried out a small piece of the prawn – cooked with coconut milk and a pinch of sugar – which, again, went really well with the rice. By this time I was ready to shout uncle, but the amiable manager there wanted us to try out the meats. I gave the chicken a miss, and had a small piece of the meat, which was – I was told – cooked the way Bengali mothers cooked meat at home (barring mine, who loved Bong food but stayed resolutely away from the kitchen). We ended the meal with some lal doi – that delicious curd – and steamed sandesh.
My friends tell me that the dishes are this good because the cooks are sticking to ways food is cooked at Bengali homes. May their karchis always wield magic!
