A couple of weeks ago my friend calls me up and says, “Listen, there’s this new Chinese place that’s opened and you have to try it. We’re going there the day after.” My friend is a great cook herself, and a sophisticated food-knowing person with a strong personality, so I know not to argue with her. I also know that she gets excited about all sorts of new places that open in Kolkata and her choices don’t always work out. Going out to eat with her is always a kind of Restaurant Russian Roulette, but after long practice I’ve now understood that the thrill is in the adventure, the not-knowing, and the risk of occasionally (well, half the time) being hit point-blank with terrible food, while the reward is some unexpectedly great eating experience.
So, two days later I find myself in a taxi, in a party of three, swerving towards what used to be the old Chinatown. The place, in a small lane off the main road, is an old Chinese building lovingly refurbished. The restaurant on the ground floor is tastefully done up in a minimal Chinese style, which is a good sign. It’s empty on a Friday night, which is not a good sign.
Being the only customers we immediately attract the attention of all five waiters, who stand around while one man takes us through the menu. First off, they don’t have a liquor licence, which is okay in this heat. Then we rapidly realise that there is no pork on offer because this is now a predominantly Muslim area; equally quickly we are told that there is no beef, because, you know, these Achhe Din are not exactly good times, even in supposedly food-liberal West Bengal. Mutton? “Oh, we stopped getting it because not many people order mutton in a Chinese restaurant.”
Flying saucers
I don’t eat fish or seafood because I’m challenged like that, but both the women I’m with love crustacean and pescatarian offerings. “You can have chicken,” says my foodie friend in her best consolation-prize voice, “their chicken is very good and then we can order some nice Chinese veggies.” The starters come and they are quite good — steamed chicken wontons and some deep-fried, sesame-flecked chicken sticks. The sauces are really fresh and have a good kick of chilli, garlic and soy.
For the main course my companions have got themselves a load of fresh flying saucers of crab in some pepper and black bean sauce. Me, I find myself eating another chicken dish (with gravy) mixed with noodles (with chicken). There is some vegetable element as well — quite okay — but by now I’m feeling like I’m the one who’s caught the bullet this evening. I suffer through the meal as my table-mates crack open crab after crab, going ooh and aah as they extricate slivers of shell from their mouths and lay them at the side of their plates like tiny little trophies. So good is the damned crab, apparently, that it even makes the chicken-on-chicken combo taste good to my (by now almost former) friends.
As we leave, we pass quite a few street-side kabab kiosks. I run the gauntlet of the wonderful smells, keeping my bitter, hungry eyes focused straight ahead; my friends are both genuinely happy; I tell myself that sometimes you have to take one for the team. Reaching home, I tell myself I’m never going out with those two again.
Procession of plates
The next morning I find myself heavily nostalgic for the late 70s and a certain kind of extended Kolkata Chinese restaurant lunch, usually partaken on a weekend, where the emptied beer bottles are lined up on the next table like some terracotta army in the Emperor’s palace in old Peking, where the procession of plates is constant, resplendent with all kinds of meatery, (leavened with dead water-creatures for the many who wanted them), with gravy dishes and dry dishes, piles of rice and noodles, with ketchupy-sweet crispy American chop suey for the one idiot who insisted, with the variations of chilli chicken openly taking out a mortgage on your digestive tract — instalments to be paid over the next few days — with cigarette smoke hanging in the air, sometimes joined by ganja smoke.
I’m sure this is a semi-false memory, and it brings back the question of what is authentic vs. what is pleasurable and memorable. This latest Chinese meal was no more authentic than the 1970s ones; both times, what we were eating was evolving Cal-Sino cuisine, which has not that much to do with Szechuan or Hunan, so the difference lay not in the food so much as the overall experience.
A couple of days ago, my foodie friend calls me again. Come home for dinner. I don’t argue, I go. I don’t regret it. There is plentiful drink, and lovely food with a fusion Japanese-Goan theme. There are two kinds of pork, two kinds of chicken, all sorts of great veg, all of it done with unpretentious flair. And the most exotic and expensive element is some kind of superior wasabi mixture to go with the perfectly rendered pumpkin tempura. At the end of the meal I almost forgive my friend for the Chinatown excursion. “So, listen,” says my friend, “there is this new, experimental north-eastern place that has opened near Gol Park. We should go next week!”
The writer is a filmmaker and columnist.
