I have a separate Calcutta City Guide as well.
Bengali food is one of my very favorite cuisines, and Calcutta is of course a great place to eat it. (But not the best! Shantiniketan has better food!) Bengali restaurants are everywhere, ranging from upscale to casual/semi-upscale to grungy cheap places, and the quality was generally quite high from what I tried, even the so-so places were pretty good. If you’re well versed in Bengali food, you’re unlikely to find restaurants offering dishes that go beyond the classics, as is expected menus are generally pretty similar. That said, dishes varied considerably from restaurant to restaurant while still being good at most places, so try as much as you can from as many different places as you can.
I’ll divide my food recommendations into four primary categories: street food, “local” Bengali restaurants, more upscale Bengali restaurants and sweet shops. A good food trip would be a mix of all of these categories, but with a focus on the actual Bengali cuisine. When I read people’s food guides to Calcutta, I find they prioritize street food, sweet shops, and Chinese restaurants too much and don’t have enough actual Bengali food. Of course, for that nothing beats eating at someone’s house, so try to do that if you can, I was lucky enough to score a few homemade meals. I will also have a brief miscellaneous section at the end with great food items at New Market (you must buy some bandel cheese), a brief section on notable non-Bengali foods at the end (I'm including the city's most noteworthy "foodie" restaurant Sienna Store here, which is Bengali inspired but not quite Bengali), and nice cafes to work from.
Note, I remarkably never got sick in my one month of eating in the city, but I wouldn't blame people at all for sticking to just the upscale restaurants since obviously hygiene is an issue.
Before I jump into my recommendations, I’ll share this list which was published shortly after I went. I don’t agree with everything on here, but overall it’s a great list, and it has a useful map, and it can give you non-vegetarian recommendations which I can’t do. The writer Priyadarshini Chatterjee is a great food writer in general (see her work in Scroll and Livemint) and I trust her judgment.
A few general guidelines and thoughts before jumping into my favorite places:
1. I say stick to the sweet shops for your sweets. Restaurants will rarely have anything you can’t get at the sweet shops, and the sweet shops will likely be higher quality and cheaper. Also, even if they are good at the restaurants, I find it impossible to enjoy them after a big meal, it is better to have them as a snack in between meals.
2. Don’t get the sweet chutneys. I had a few great homemade chutneys, but at nearly every restaurant they were disgustingly sweet. I think the only place I liked the chutney was Kewpie’s. People say these are good for digestion but this is largely a farce, a lie people tell themselves to justify overindulging, just like all Indian digestive foods, don’t buy into it.
3. I think Calcutta is the only place in India other than Kashmir where I didn’t find a single whole grain in the local cuisine. Rice is the main starch, and it’s always white rice, and then the wheat based breads are all refined flour and fried. In other areas where people eat rice heavy diets (namely the South), it’s pretty normal to get unpolished rice or millets, it’s not just something people trying to be healthy do, but I didn’t see that once here. Maybe in villages? I would love to get more village style Bengali food. Anyway, everyone will disagree with me for this, but for the most part I say stick with rice rather than the breads. Having luchis or kochuris with your meal doesn’t add sufficient culinary pleasure that is commensurate with the heavy caloric addition, and even if you wish to indulge there are plenty of amazing fried dough things to eat on the streets, so it is better to save room for those. Bengali restaurant meals are often heavy so you don’t want to overindulge and end up unable to adequately eat at your next meal. Think about the big picture. Perhaps there is some essential pairing between the fried breads with a particular dish, but I never found one, and even my favorite fried breads were on the streets rather than in restaurants. I don’t understand the point of Bengali kachoris, they are so minimally stuffed that you don’t even notice the stuffing? To be clear, these breads are delicious and you should have them at some point, but save them for the end of the trip. There’s so much stuff to eat in Calcutta, remember it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
4. I never order beverages, but at 6 Ballygunge Place Thali the meal included gondhoraj ghol which was sensational, maybe the best yogurt based beverage I’ve had in India, in fact maybe the best beverage of any kind I’ve ever had in my life. So if a restaurant has gondhoraj ghol, order it! But no promises it will have the perfect refreshing balance of the slight sweetness, delicate aroma, and nuanced tang as the one I had.
5. I like shukto, but it’s sad to me that the glory of the bitter gourd is adulterated by the presence of other vegetables. The only other bitter gourd preparation I had in Bengal was a minimally spiced, deep fried preparation. Where are the glorious Bengali bitter gourd preparations?
6. Other cuisines in India use mustard oil but Bengali food is the only one where I get a strong mustard taste (the exception would be the limited amount of Bihari food I’ve had, but that’s next door). Why is that? Is it the quality of the mustard seeds/oil you get in Bengal? (That’s my guess.) Or is it not actually the oil that gives the mustardy taste but instead a use of ground mustard seeds (that was the case for some dishes, but not all)? It could be because some of the food I had here was oiler than in other mustard oil territories, but that wasn’t always true, and I had some great, non-oily, mustardy food that didn’t appear to have mustard paste. (I’m basing this off the idea in my head that mustard oil gives a mustard taste/aroma without the sinus clearing mustard burn that mustard paste gives, is that accurate?) I sadly never had any desserts in Bengal that used mustard, a huge missed opportunity. [2025 edit: I've since learned that in other parts of North India the mustard oil is heated to its smoke point to reduce the mustard taste. Also, the food in Odisha was similarly mustardy, but generally less oily.]
7. Bengali ghee is amazing, it has a rich caramelized taste that reminds me of gingerbread, or gingerbread houses, not so much in the taste but in the false nostalgic emotional memory it evokes, of a fantasy snowed out winter cottage with a chimney puffing out the scent of warm baked goodies inside. I recommend taking some home. I’ve seen accusations that some brands add aroma, I wouldn’t be surprised. Buy a homemade one, if you can. I would like some input from Bengali ghee experts.
8. I once got local milk delivered in a water bottle and it was sweeter than most milk. I want to learn more about this.
“Local” Bengali Restaurants
I am designating “local” restaurants as places that are small, shabby, fairly cheap (though some of these places aren’t that cheap), and occasionally on the grungy side (spotted a rat at one, large cockroach at another… it’s up to you whether you can tolerate this!). You can find these throughout the city, and they were some of my favorite meals. They are definitely better for meat and fish eaters, though some of them had fabulous vegetarian options (some none at all). Menus change daily, and it seems there is more variety at lunch time, and they are less shady seeming at lunch time so go for lunch (I believe some of the places make the food at lunch time and re-serve it at dinner, so better to get it while it’s fresh).
Here is a good Twitter thread on “Pice Hotels” which gives a bit of history. Some of these places are 100+ years old and have a lot of history, and you do get the feeling of traveling back in time when going into them. Food at these places can be oiler than I prefer, but despite that I felt the food was more homestyle than what we’d typically get at more upscale places. I don’t have a sophisticated enough understanding to tell you which places serve Ghoti cuisine compared to Bangal cuisine, but that may account for the differences in style of some of them. It was not uncommon to see attractive young women eating alone at some of these places, an unlikely sight at any similarly grungy restaurants anywhere else in India, I think that says something special about Calcutta but I’m not sure what it means.
Note, at some of these places the staff spoke neither English nor Hindi and didn’t even understand what “veg” or “vegetarian” meant. “Niramish” is the Bengali word for vegetarian, and I believe it also excludes garlic and onion.
My favorite pice hotel by far was Hotel Tarun Niketan near Kalighat metro station. Excellent range of vegetable dishes, dal, and even unusual pakodas that you are unlikely to find anywhere else (there was a pumpkin flower one which I really liked, but the highlight was bottle gourd layered with mustard sauce, insanely good). Everything was excellent, perhaps my favorite meal in Kolkata, if I lived nearby I would be a regular. Just order everything.
My next favorite was Suruchi Self-Help Group on Elliot Road, walking distance from Park Street. Great home style, non-oily food, even though the dishes were less unusual than what was served at Tarun Niketan. Probably the cleanest of these, surprisingly it was empty when we went for lunch.
I also really liked Dacres Lane Pice Hotel near Jodhpur Park, which is newer than these other places and therefore less charming, but also cleaner (fairly oily though). Not worth the detour but a great place to grab lunch in the neighborhood. Young Bengal Hotel was also really good but didn’t stand out enough to be worth going out of your way for. Mahal Restaurant near College Street had an exceptional dal but an uninteresting and overly oily mixed vegetable dish, the fish eaters seemed to be having a great time though, worth going to if you’re in the neighborhood. Hotel Siddeshwari Ashram is often recommended but there was just a boring watery dal and an oily vegetable dish for vegetarians when we went for dinner, but it could be great for meat/fish eaters. [2025 edit: Went to the much beloved Swadhin Bharat Hindu Hotel on a very brief trip to the city. As a vegetarian I felt the food was pretty unremarkable, though I really liked the raw mango chutney.]
Also in this category are little stalls on the sidewalk dishing out thalis for like 30 rupees. I’m sure some of these are great, but they often looked too unclean and/or oily. We did get two of them, one of them was great, I believe it was on BTM Sarani across from the GPO building. There’s a whole line of them, walk through the line to find the best one. Many of them just have dal and either potato or a basic mixed vegetable dish for vegetarians, but this place had some more unique homestyle vegetable dishes (albeit more oily than I’d like).
Upscale Bengali Restaurants
The more upscale restaurants tend to be a different style, typically less spicy and oily while also being sweeter and having a better presentation. In the best cases, they still serve great, authentic food and they are often still very reasonably priced.
The clear winner here was Kewpie’s. Excellent homestyle Bengali food, but more refined and delicately flavored than the more local restaurants, and to me it seemed the most authentic of all of the upscale places. Portions are small, definitely get a thali and add on dishes if you like. Everything is good, though a highlight is the daab jhinge. The only let down was channar dalna, which was more like a mutter paneer, but this happened to us a few times on our trip so maybe I’m just confused. We went twice and both times there was just one other table occupied, don’t be alarmed by this.
The runner-up was 6 Ballygunge Place, which is a mini chain, we went to the original branch in Ballygunge (the actual address is 6 Ballygunge Place). Unfortunately we only went once, but the food was delicious. We got shukto, potoler dolma, and one of the dals, I would gladly go back and eat through the rest of the menu. We also went to their thali restaurant 6 Ballygunge Place Thali (we went to the one down the street from South City Mall) and though I’d prefer going to the a la carte restaurant, the food here was great and it’s a great value, it’s rare to get such high quality food at a chain thali restaurant (where the flavors are often generic), and you occasionally get dishes you won’t find on any menus, like the simple methi sabzi. We even ordered delivery from here a few times, with one thali easily serving two people. They switch up the drinks they give with the thali, but the gondhoraj ghol is exceptionally good.
Another upscale place I liked was Aaheli at the Peerless Inn hotel (there are a few other branches as well). The thalis are very expensive but ordering a la carte is surprisingly inexpensive (at least for vegetarians) for a fancy hotel restaurant. I didn’t feel the flavors stood out here as much as at other places, but the food was definitely solid, and there were a few interesting dishes that I didn’t see elsewhere. I really loved a masoor dal paturi, made with pumpkin leaves(!), therefore you could eat the charred wrapping, as opposed to the usual banana leaf wrap. It’s worth going for that alone.
I also really liked Kasturi, another mini-chain, we went to the original on Marquis street (note this isn’t as upscale as the other restaurants mentioned) and got aloo posto, channar dalna, and mochar ghonto, all delicious, though richer, oilier, and spicier than the above restaurants. We never went in Kolkata, but I always really liked the food at Bhojohori Manna in Mumbai, so that’s a solid option as well. Satapadi was decent chain food, not as good as the above mentioned places but a good option if you’re for some reason in one of the suburbs that has this place but little else (and I really liked their litchi chili payesh). Speaking of chains, I had Oh Calcutta once in Mumbai and was unimpressed…
One place I wanted to try but was unable to was Amar Khamar, which mostly sells fancy organic local ingredients but occasionally hosts meals or does takeaway meals. Check their website to see what’s going on, it sounds great.
Street Food
Kolkata has excellent street food, though I generally found it less interesting than the actual meals. Still, budget at least some of your calories for street food.
Jhalmuri: Maybe my favorite, basically bhel/churmuri with a strong mustard oil flavor. It was good everywhere I got it, just from small vendors that had decent crowds. They never seemed very clean but I never got sick…
Phuchkas: I’m too much of an uncultured simpleton to be able to tell the difference between Kolkata phuchkas and other phuchkas, but here’s a quote from a Vir Sanghvi article where he asks the great chef Vikramjit Roy: “they never use suji puris in Kolkata. Puchka water in Delhi can rely on saunth or mint. But in Kolkata, it has a distinctive khatta taste that comes from lemon (often Gondhoraj lemon) and the Cal potato stuffing differs from Delhi because it includes white peas.” In all honesty, I didn’t find them to be unique enough to be worth wasting calories on if you’re on a brief Kolkata trip, other street foods deserve a higher priority. Then again, I’m not much of a phuchkannoisseur. If you feel you must, they were always good and any crowded neighborhood place will do. The famous places (all clustered in the south, it seems) like Dilip Da’s phuchka, Rajendra phuchka, and Bada phuchka (maybe my favorite, my wife felt they were too big, which is true) were all excellent, though I think more known for gimmicks like different fillings (aloo dum and dahi) than necessarily having superior phuchkas. I’m not sure. I enjoyed this article about phuchkanomics which estimates that over a million people are involved in the phuchka business in Kolkata, though I think they overestimate (they don’t consider that the women involved in the laborious prepwork likely supply to numerous phuchka vendors, and their estimate of the phuchka vendors in general likely comes out too high in the first place). If you take their numbers at face value and extrapolate it out to all of the other foods in the city, you’d get a number of food industry workers that vastly exceeds the city’s actual population, so something is wrong here.
Kathi rolls - My wife was excited for these and I was not, rolls in India are mostly mediocre and even if the Kolkata kathi rolls are better, they are meant for meat eaters and it didn’t seem worth wasting a meal on. But early in our trip we went to the original Nizam’s near New Market and it was excellent. After this we tried a number of famous places (Kusum, Anamika, Arsalan) and they were never quite as good, but they were still mostly very good. The problem is that many of them put sauces even if you ask them not to. The green sauces are usually okay, but the red ketchupy sauce is awful and ruins it. (What was the point of communism if it couldn’t keep ketchup out? What a waste.) I think any popular roll place will be fine if you can get them to hold the sauces, but Nizam’s is the best. The simplicity of the masala and onions and the squeeze of lime is all you need (I can’t remember if Nizam’s had no sauce at all or if it just had no sweet sauce, which is the real evil here). Also, the vegetarian preparations (potato or paneer) often had the sweet sauce mixed in, this is also bad. If you don’t eat egg, I’m not sure it’s worth it, to be honest (I also don’t think most restaurants do a good job of segregating the veg and non-veg ones, the meat that is added after the paratha is cooked so I don’t think there is cross contamination but the egg is cooked directly on the pan, so be aware if you care about these things). For an eggetarian, I think the plain egg rolls might be the best, adding potato or paneer likely just takes away from it, but I didn’t eat enough of them to develop a well solidified view on the matter. But the real issue is the ketchup, keep that out and you’re fine.
Shingharas - AKA samosas. Maybe the best in India. Worth trying as the spices are distinctly Bengali. In the winter you get cauliflower and pea ones, I’m told there are also seasonal pumpkin ones. They were generally all good, but my favorites were Ghosh and Co sweet shop (my favorite sweet shop, on Bidhan Sarani) and an unnamed tea stall slightly to the west of Vien sweet shop on Shakespeare Sarani.
Kachori sabzi - It’s delicious, but is it worth the calories when there is so much other good stuff to eat? I say no… Even in my grumpiness about fried food, though, I admit the crisply fried kachori at Kanhaiya Kachori was a thing of beauty.
Ghugni - Always good! A nice healthyish street snack.
Dacres Lane stew - From the famous Chitto Babur Dokan. Fun mix of Indian and British food cultures. I like the giant toast slices they use in Calcutta.
I never had the telebhajas, will go to the famous Laxmi Narayan Shaw and Sons on the next trip.
Also, somewhat astonishingly, I never got sick until the day I left the city and had masala wood apple at a railway station a few hours away. Highly recommended if you see it, worth the gastrointestistinal distress and wasted vacation day. One of my favorite things I ate in 2022.
Lastly, there are the cabin restaurants, not technically street food but close enough, I never went but they seem fun, here’s an article on them. I did get a beetroot cutlet from the outdoor cabin stall Mukti Cabin and it was excellent, incredibly flavorful with or without the mustard sauce.
Sweet shops
I’m not the best person to ask here because I don’t have a huge sweet tooth and found most sweets in Calcutta to be too sweet. That said, I did love a number of things that I tried, and in general I felt, despite Bengal being stereotyped as having a heavy sweet tooth, the sweets here were actually less sweet than in most of India, and the same sweets are much better here than elsewhere. I’m not very knowledgable about Indian sweets (partly because I don’t especially like them and that’s partly because I generally find them too sweet), but the Bengali sweets were more appealing to me than most North Indian sweets, characterized by a fresh dairy taste as opposed to the caramelized milky taste. For me, the best Bengali sweets were like mildly sweetened fresh dairy products (cheese, cream, yogurt, whatever), and they were divine, while too much sugar smothers the fresh dairy taste. I was there in winter when nolen gur was in season, and the nolen gur sweets are a much beloved delicacy, and while I generally prefer the more complex taste of unrefined sweeteners, in some cases with Bengali sweets I actually preferred the regular sugar sweets to the nolen gur ones as I could better appreciate the delicate milky flavors. Just a simple sandesh ended up being my favorite thing, so long as it wasn’t too sweet.
I tried probably around 20 sweet shops and the clear winner for me was Ghosh and Co on Bidhan Sarani, which has two branches just a few blocks from each other (one titled New Ghosh and Co, I believe it all comes from the same kitchen, and on google maps there are more places with the same name in the vicinity, I believe they are unrelated). Not too sweet and everything tasted very fresh. Just go here and try as much as you can. Sandesh, rabri (if I recall correctly this was lightly sweet with a hunk of unsweetened dried malai in it to further balance the sweetness), whatever, it was all great.
By the way, read what I wrote on Hatun Bazaar in the city guide, I loved some of the sweets I had there.
My second favorite was probably Park Sweets. The state run chain Sundarini Naturals didn’t seem as fresh as these (it’s a chain, so I think that’s a given), but the sweetness levels worked well for me. At many of the most renowned places I just found everything too sweet to be enjoyable.
The rossagulla at Vien was my favorite, in the evening when it was fresh and warm. Don’t eat any rossagulla that isn’t fresh and warm, but either way I’m not so sure about this whole rossagulla thing. Can I get it without them soaking it in sugar syrup, with some honey or nolen gur on the side?
At Dwariks Grandsons we got a thing of unsweetened yogurt to take home… and it was lightly sweetened… and it was my favorite sweet I got in the entire city? Maybe that’s the secret, ask for the unsweetened stuff and they’ll sweeten it to perfection.
There ARE in fact places to get unsweetened Bengali sweets, or at least something similar, but the natural sweetness of the milk makes them delicious. Read what I wrote about Hatun Bazaar on getting unsweetened khoya. A few places offer unsweetened sandesh (it’s confusing because far more places offer “sugar free” sweets with artificial sweeteners and it can be hard to communicate the difference) which I liked. We also got a great unsweetened sweet thing from a place Yadav Milk Supply in Barabazar (they called it a malai roll), and nearby at Banshi Maharaj Dhudwale we got dried out cream (I think) which was awesome!
Back to things with added sugar: I had one jalebi on a walking tour from a random street stall that looked shady that I never would have gotten from if it weren’t recommended by a guide, and it was the best jalebi I’ve ever had, crisp, tangy, and not too sweet. So get jalebi, somewhere or another. A taste of gajjar ka halwa from a random busy sweet shop was also successful, it was less sweet and more carrot-y and mawa-y than probably any other I’ve had.
I also recommend visiting Pabrai’s, a local ice cream shop known for natural fruit flavors with a handful of branches in the city. They have some good local flavors like nolen gur, paan, and a number of seasonal options. When we were there they had falsa berry sorbet and tamarind sorbet with chili salt sprinkled on top. The gondaraj ice cream was disappointing, at least based on the sample I tried. They should do mustard ice cream!
Speaking of ice cream, I loved the orange kulfi, served in an orange, from a guy at Vardaan market who changes his offerings seasonally. Vardaan Market has good street food in general, but the highlight for me was a guy selling interesting fruits, the standout being a small fruit that smells like rose (not what comes up when you type in rose apple into google, that’s Java apple, which he also had).
Also, if you like sweet beverages, there’s the iconic Paramount Cold Drinks and Syrups. I loved going to the place, one of those old city institutions where everyone who's anyone in the city's history went to, and nothing has changed in a century. But we asked for the least sweet drink, and for it to be made as not sweet as possible, and it was too sweet for me (my sugar tolerance for drinks is lower than for foods, just for the record). I liked it though (the coconut one). Give it a shot though, if this sounds like your thing. Their walls are lined with syrups that I believe they make, so maybe that means they use real syrups rather than artificial flavors like most places?
Miscellaneous Stuff At New Market
New Market, the old covered market hall, is one of my favorite places in Calcutta and they have a few unique food items that are worth picking up.
Bandel cheese - “Thomas Bowrey notes in the Geographical Account of Countries Round the Bay of Bengal, 1669 to 1679, that the Portuguese settlers around the Bandel region started making cheese to replicate the light and creamy Queijo fresco cheese, roughly 400 years ago. But they eventually adopted the technique of smoking the cheese from their Dutch neighbours in Chinsurah, who shipped the smoked Bandel cheese to far-off countries including Batavia, which is present-day Jakarta.” (Source) That’s the story of Bandel cheese, from the former Portuguese colony of Bandel not far up the Hooghly river. The cheese is delicious and very cheap, definitely worth buying. It’s very hard and salty so you have to soak it, then it becomes crumbly and not excessively salty (if you oversoak it then it gets mushy and bland). I love the smoky flavor and have used it in pizzas, pastas, scrambled eggs, toasts, sandwiches, quiches, beans, and sauteed veggies. Think of it like a strongly flavored cheese to garnish. I’m shocked more restaurants don’t use it. (If I recall correctly I’ve only previously had it in Mumbai at Bombay Canteen with roasted bhavnagari chillies and at Toast and Tonic on a mushroom toast, both great uses of it. None of the places I went in Calcutta used it, I only saw it on the menu in a croquette at a few places I researched, and then one place had a cocktail with it but when we went there the music was so loud and bad that we just walked out.)
You can get it at a few shops in New Market, one called J Jhonson which is on Google maps and another is a few stalls down. They have smoked and unsmoked varieties though I swear the unsmoked one is also smoky. I like both and it’s cheap enough to buy both. You can also buy from a company called The Whole Hog Deli which also sells various meat products that I believe are supposed to be unusual and good quality. I thought I read that they claimed to source a true authentic Bandel cheese while the other sellers don’t, but now I can’t find where I actually read that. Anyway I felt they all tasted the same. The Whole Hog delivers across the country. I’ve heard Biswa Bangla stores also sell Bandel cheese but I didn’t see it in the few I went to.
I’m curious how other people use it. I saw this Facebook post while researching: “I was crazy over Bandel cheese when I lived in Cal. I return to visit after 28 years, go straight to the New Market - lo and behold the Bandel cheese sat there on the counter. As soon as I put it in my mouth I had to spit it out because it was awful and just not the same. I was very disappointed. Seems like we just have to cling to ‘memories’ of the taste.” I would love to know if other people have noticed the decline. All I can say is that I liked it!
Also, I’ve heard Kalimpong cheese is available in New Market but I never saw it.
Nahoum’s Bakery - 100+ year old Jewish bakery, maybe the city’s oldest bakery and also maybe Asia’s only Jewish bakery this side of the middle east? One of their signatures is ironically the Christmas cake which people (likely mostly non-Christian) line up for hours to buy (cue cheesy inspirational love letter to India’s beautiful syncretism… but hey, it’s true!). I usually like these old bakeries more for the story and old world charm than the actual food they sell, and yes that’s much of the appeal here too (just google search for tons of articles about their history), but some of their baked goods are actually excellent. I did really like the Christmas cake (they might sell this year round, it’s called the rich fruit cake), but my favorite was the cheese puff, with homemade cheese that is apparently a signature of the Bagdadi Jews (more info on that here, from a NatGeo article but for some reason NatGeo links don’t work anymore). Truly excellent stuff. They also sell cheese sambusaks, but none were available when I was there. Everyone recommends the lemon puff but they also never had that, apparently you need to go in the morning. But I think the cheese dishes are more unique, prioritize those. They sometimes have other seasonal/holiday dishes, and sometimes they have challah. There are other very old bakeries in the city from different communities (many Christian, see the famous Goan owned Saldanha Bakery), we did try an Anglo Indian bakery which had a chenna cheesecake which would have been great if it weren’t so sweet. I will try to sample more next time, and more from Nahoum’s. I love these old places, ungentrified, uncorporatized (see the mediocre looking Flurys as a counterpoint). It’s too bad the old meat shop founded by a Hungarian trapeze artist shut down.
Also, New Market has Sabitri Dalmoot Store, which was the favorite of Satyajit Ray. I sampled their wares, they were delicious.
Non-Bengali Food
There are a few non-Bengali restaurants of consequence in Calcutta (my criteria here is something unique that is difficult to find in other major cities), but not many and I’m comfortable telling you to stick exclusively to Bengali food. If you don’t know the difference between Ghoti and Bangal cuisines, you do not have permission to read further. If you do not know which of the five taste elements is supposed to start the Bengali meal, you must skip immediately to the next section. If you don’t yet know your dalnas from your dolmas, may the curse of Kali afflict your family for generations if you continue reading this section.
(I'm kind of joking though, and the city's different communities are an important part of its culture and food culture, so give this a read. Note that I didn't make it to all of these places, but I'm including some places I want to check out in the future.)
Sienna Store - One of the only chef driven restaurants in the city, and definitely the city's coolest restaurant. There are two menus, the regular menu which is good quality but fairly typical cafe-ish comfort food, and then a weekly menu with more creative dishes that incorporate local, seasonal produce. This is still generally rooted in kind of comfort food and it isn’t revolutionary, but it’s all great. As it’s a changing menu I can’t give recommendations (though you should undoubtedly stick to the seasonal menu), but to give an idea of what they have, some dishes I got include a risotto made with a local black rice variety and local mushrooms and a ravioli stuffed with local greens in a sauce of the local caramelized ghee. Their store also sells various local foods to take home such as the rice and ghee. There actually are occasionally Bengali inspired dishes (much more often on the non-vegetarian side of the menu, it seems), you might get lucky with one of those. They often promote the current menu on their Instagram so it’s worth checking, and they occasionally have special meals and pop ups as well. At one point they had tasting menus which I'm sure are excellent, I'm not sure how often they have that though.
Royal Vega - At the ITC, all vegetarian, apparently takes inspiration from the Sheherwali Jains of Bengal (the only other place I know of where this cuisine is commercially available is at Bari Kothi near Murshidabad). I ate at the Royal Vega in Chennai and wasn’t enthusiastic about it (and generally I’m a big fan of the ITC restaurants), well executed but mostly uninteresting “shahi” type food, but I’ve heard good things about the Calcutta branch and the local influences make it intriguing (also, my meal at the Chennai branch was in 2016 so I’m open to giving it another shot). I wanted to go on my trip but was too enamored with Bengali food to give it a shot. Maybe next time, though it’s still hard to prioritize over Bengali food. Vir Sanghvi had similar feelings as me to the Chennai restaurant but liked this one more, though I’m still on the fence. “I am not a huge fan of the Chennai Royal Vega, which serves rich, shaadi-type vegetarian food but I can see why ITC would bring the brand to a Marwari-dominated market. What I didn’t expect was that I would love the food at the Cal version so much. I had great dahi-bhallas, super channa bhaturas and an unusual raw mango kheer.” Still, while “unusual raw mango kheer” excites me, dahi bhallas and channa bhaturas, no matter how good, don’t inspire me to allot one of my meals here. The early paragraphs in this article are more promising, but it’s unclear to me if the Sheherwali Jain dishes make their regular menu or are just there on special occasion. I would call and confirm before booking, and possibly try to arrange a special meal of these dishes.
Avartana - Also at the ITC, modern South Indian tasting menu, I’ve heard it’s amazing and the original restaurant in Chennai is at the top of my list of restaurants in India that I most want to eat at. I almost went here in Calcutta but decided to save it for the next trip to Chennai. That said, if you don’t plan on going to Chennai anytime soon (or Mumbai, where they've also opened), this is almost certainly worthy of being one of your meals in Calcutta.
Chinese restaurants - Going for Chinese food in Calcutta is a “thing to do,” though you’ll probably have to put effort in if you want anything you won’t get at your average Indian Chinese restaurant. Or so I think, I've had Indian Chinese food like five times in my life. I’ve heard people say there’s nothing authentic left in Calcutta but I don’t think that’s entirely true. Tiretta Bazaar early in the morning (I’m told by 7am) apparently still has Chinese homechefs selling steamed buns and whatnot, though I’ve heard it's a shadow of its former self. Ah Leung in Tangra looks pretty authentic (open at odd hours), as do some others in both Chinatowns. I would have liked to check these places out, but I’m not a morning person and as a vegetarian I couldn’t eat any of this stuff anyway, and I came to Calcutta from Thailand which has much more impressive Chinatowns so it wasn’t very novel. I had a fun and admittedly delicious meal at a restaurant called Golden Joy in Tangra, but it was nothing to write home about, and my efforts to ask for something authentic totally failed (“We want something authentically Chinese, not Indian Chinese.” “Try paneer manchurian.” “Well we’re looking for something authentic. We’re thinking Hakka noodles, and anything else you have that’s unique to the Hakka community.” “Better to try Singapore noodles, they are tastier.” and etc.)
The billionaire food connoisseur Harsh Goenka swears by the Chinese bhel at Bar-B-Q… maybe next time.
Blue Poppy Thakali - I believe the chef is Tibetan and Chinese and grew up in Kalimpong. All of those influences make it into the menu, which also has a strong Nepali component. Everyone tells you to go for the momos but the Nepali thali for me was where it’s at. Though the momos were great too, probably the best I’ve had outside of Nepal or Ladakh, and similar in style to homestyle ones as opposed to the typical street ones. Gaggan is a fan of their chili pork so if you eat pork get that as well. It's hard to get food like this in most Indian cities, so I will allow you to eat here if you aren’t going to Nepal anytime soon, or if you eat pork.
Awadhi food - I’m clearly not the best person to ask about the city’s Muslim restaurant scene, but it is an important part of Calcutta’s food culture and history. As the story goes, when Nawab Wajid Ali Shah was exiled to Calcutta, his chefs came with him and that sparked the origin of some of the iconic Muslim restaurants and dishes of the city. How true some of the restaurants’ stories are, I don’t know, but the broad strokes are true. I did get an Awadhi meals that I recommend at Manzilat’s, run by the great great granddaughter of Wajid Ali Shah who now hosts a limited number of guests by reservation only on a rooftop in the southeast part of the city. Out of the way for most visitors, but if you’re staying nearby it’s definitely worthwhile, food you won’t find anywhere else (as a vegetarian, though, it’s not that exciting, but it was still very good). This is much more refined than what you'll get at your typical "Mughlai" restaurant, but the prices are still very reasonable.
Glenburn Penthouse - Tasting menu, mostly European inspired it seems, but has Bengali elements (while researching I saw dishes with gondhoraj foam, bandel cheese, kalimpong cheese, local fish varieties, mishti doi ice cream, etc). It didn’t seem interesting/exceptional enough to justify the high price tag (I’d rather save my money and go somewhere like Masque), but it seems to be good quality and has enough interesting local elements to be worthwhile on a longer trip. I would go if I were rich.
Lastly, I didn’t try it as you’d have to pay me to debase myself by eating fast food, but Dominos has Bengali flavors on their pizza. There’s the kasundi and kosha pizzas (both of those have veg and non veg options), and even the malai paneer pizzas have “coconut , Panchphoran and mustard” in them. I don’t think I’ve ever had a mustard sauce on pizza, that could be a good idea? I wouldn’t mind trying their flavors from a good quality pizzeria. There were some good looking Italian restaurants in the city, I would have gone if they had these offerings.
There's also a Howrah based bean-to-bar chocolate brand called Rushk that I hope to try out next time.
Cafes To Work From
I initially didn't include this section since I wanted to focus on local things that make the city special and not generic stuff like cafes, but I want to encourage remote workers to pick more interesting cities to work remotely in, so I thought I'd promote the nice cafes in Kolkata that we went to.
Most of the cafes I went to are clustered in the nice southern part of the city or around Park Street. Listing them quickly: Artsy Cafe, Glenburn Cafe, Roastery, Sienna Store, The Daily, Colab Coffee, Blue Tokai (numerous branches, they are always pretty nice), Craft Coffee, and Motherland Cafe. I found 8th Day a bit too small for working. 108 Cafe is a very cool little cafe with terrific coffee in Tangra, though it's probably too small to work from, and I think it's only open by appointment only. I recently heard of new cafe Red Bari, it looks nice.
And lastly, I liked this Bengali food blog, especially the dessert section. I fantasize frequently about the wood apple tart that my wife refuses to make for me despite being an accomplished baker.
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