Tasting Times!

 One of my friends once asked me how can I get lost so often in a city I live in and yet manage to find my way around completely strange cities! Well the answer is simple: You can’t get lost if you don’t know where you are supposed to be!
And it was on one such ‘Oh-God-I-Am-Lost-Again’ afternoons, while walking through the meandering lanes and bylanes of North Kolkata, part of the city I call home, that my gourmand’s nose led me to a humble food stall. What caught my attention was the name —  Baruah & Dey— a rather unusual name for an eatery! There were seven-eight people eating outside sharing a long wooden bench and inside was a man making fresh batches of fries. “O kaku panteras hobey? (Uncle do you have panteras?) A boy with eyes hungrier and bigger than mine was peering from behind. “Panteras? Now what the hell is that?" I had never heard anything like it before! I went in to check the menu — maybe he meant something else I thought. The menu read: breast cutlet, fish fry, chicken fry, fish roll...and yes ‘Pantaras’!


I asked the lady at the counter what this weird word meant and of course she had no idea! But she told me that Panteras is to the Dey and Baruah what Kati rolls are to the Nizam’s — a house specialty. I knew that I had to taste it! And as I took the first bite I realised I was not lost! I felt like Columbus! And it was my destiny to discover the Panteras—a heavenly piece of cutlet made with chicken and eggs and more (however, I still have no clue what the word means. The closest I found on Google was: St Pantherus, martyred in Alexandria, in a slowly burning fire with Paul)
A friend once said: “Families of north Kolkata are very particular about their food. We are brought up on a strict beguni-kobiraji-fish fry diet. Our Sunday mornings are never complete without parar morer gutey kochuri ar jilipi. We need ‘cha’ er shathe ‘ta’ and more oily the ‘ta’ the better!” As a true Bangal should know his ilish and a ghoti his chingri, a quintessential north Calcuttan should be tested on his knowledge about cutlets — how coverage cutlet (chicken cutlet covered with egg) became kobiraji cutlet, and why not to look shell-shocked when someone says: ‘O dada duto breast deben’ and in reply comes another equally shocking question: ‘Kaar?’
And it is for this very reason that in north Kolkata at some non-descript corner of some dark unknown alley you might stumble upon a shop selling even a mouthful of sky (coated with breadcrumbs and deep-fried!). Some such must-try foods of north Kolkata are radhaballavi and chholar daal at Puntiram, mutton Afghani at coffee house and egg devils at Bholanath Cabin. And if you like ‘moton’ and you are a bong, it would be a sin to stop you from sampling Gol Bari’s kosha mangsho (I have always found their mutton a bit dry and stodgy though). Lakhinarayan Shaw’s (on Bidhan Sarani) peyaji— a favourite of Subhas Bose — still remains one of the best the city offers. Another shop famous for its telebhaja is Kalika Mukhorochok Telebhaja on Surya Sen Street — their mochar chop chingrir chop, fish chop, mutton chop and egg chop are simply ‘gorge-ous’!
However, if you are neither the explorer kinds nor belong to the bharey cha-Potla’r telebhaja-roakey adda clan and the ghoogni gali at Hatibagan doesn’t make you salivate, then the cafes and cabin restaurants are just the right place for you.
Cabin restaurants, as the names suggest, had small wooden cabins with curtains (usually red!). Today most of these hotels have tore down these cabins to make space for more customers and gone are the romance of the red curtains but what remains is the cha with some lip-smacking, oil-dripping ta and the bikeler adda. Mitali, Dilruba, New Malancha, Ratna and Silver Valley are some such restaurants which still serve great food. However, a few cabin hotels in and around Hatibagan still boast these romance and nostalgia-laden wooden cabins as does Niren Cabin at Shovabazar. Initially made to provide some privacy to the ‘family crowd’, these are now hot favourites among the lovebirds!
I still remember whenever ma took me to Hatibagan for shopping; we would go to Shupti or such cabin restaurants and gorge into heavenly moglai parotas (famous at Anadi Cabin) and mammoth-size dhakai parotas (I don’t know of any place that still serves this variety). But more than the food, I used to love those cosy little cabins and always insisted on closing the curtain and shutting the world out—now this can be my train, my chariot, my horse-drawn carriage and even my thatch-roofed hut!
However, it was when I was in college that I got introduced to the ‘real thrills’ of a ‘cabin hotel’ with Dikhusha becoming a part of our everyday life. And these 'thrills' had absolutely nothing to do with their amazing kobiraji (which even my brother, who describes eating a oil-soaked kobiraji as similar to having a cold dalda-laden biryani and cough syrup after five days on anti-biotic, found delicious the last time I went)!
These cabins were places where ‘first meetings’ between prospective ‘lovers’ were ‘organised’, where the shy guy would take five cutlets and nine cups of tea to propose to that ‘trying-to-look-shy-but-am-bored-to death-and-I-hate-red-rose’ girl, where friends would console the ‘heartbroken’ by offering him their own precious cigarettes and tea and paying the bill of a mammoth meal, and where the waiter will always peek with the bill when you have finally manage to muster the courage for that first kiss! So much were these cabins a part of some love stories that according to ‘urban legend’ a famous cabin hotel at Shyambazar had specially decorated one of their cabins to celebrate the marriage of one such couple!
Among the existing cafe’s one of the most popular one is the Mitra Cafe at Baghbazar and their brain chop can be easily regarded as Kolkata’s answer to the Mumbai’s bheja fry (even Sarvi’s!). However, near Mitra cafe, is a small cafe called Allen Kitchen, with a brief menu but scrumptious food including the best (even if a tad expensive at Rs 74) prawn cutlets (also try their chicken stack!) in the city. The members of the family still supervise the kitchen and the recipes are never given to outside cooks.
Unlike other restaurants, these eateries serve tea along with food and are ideal for long uninterrupted adda sessions. Although, food in these cabins and cafes are usually drowned in oil, it is nonetheless fresh and unbelievably cheap (and you also get onion- cucumber salad and mustard sauce free! Free! FREE!). Some of these restaurants serve amazingly appetizing stews and a few (like Purbani near Hatibagan) even make mouth-watering mangsho’r shingara (not to be confused with North India samosas) on Sundays!
And then there are cabins meant just for intellectual and political discussions—where all the items on the menu are within Rs10 and includes kata cake, paan cake, lebu cha, biscuit and the likes!