The College Street Hing-er Kochuri is quite unique to Calcutta with a puri stuffed with a thin layer of dal and served with a potato and pumpkin curry. The Girish Park-er Shoitan Deem was a devilled egg or Deemer Devil with a shami kebab coating instead of the usual minced meat coating. There’s the Beadon Street Fish Roll which is served with a mustard mayonnaise. The menu follows the Metro station stops and includes street-food from each of these locations. The menu has been put together by Calcutta-based home chef, Iti Misra. I was a little hesitant, because I rarely if ever find restaurants able to serve up authentic tasting Bengali or Calcutta food.īut thankfully, I was pleasantly surprised. Which is why, my heart skipped a beat when I was invited by Monkey Bar to try their street food snacks as part of their Calcutta street food festival for Durga Puja. Fish chops are a highlight of street food at Kolkata during Durga Puja. When we were younger, our hearts stronger and our waists tinier, none of these mattered. You have to brave the crowds, traverse roads which are chock-a-block with traffic, wipe away sweat and grime, and ignore the fact that all the fried food is dripping oil.
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Now the thing with eating street food in Calcutta, especially during the Pujas is that you have to be made of really stern stuff. Then there’s the alur chop and piyaji, which are our versions of alu bondas and pyaaz pakoda – flattened and tastier, of course. Crumb-fried fish, chicken cutlets and fish chop are staples in most Bengali homes. Another favourite is the “ feesh chop” or fish rissoles, which we claim to have learnt from the British, but it’s a dish the British never knew of. It’s our version of a cocktail snack – stick a toothpick in it and eat it. And can be – in fact, must be – eaten without luchi. The alur dum you get in the little shops which pop up, or from the carts, is very different from the one we make at home. Ladled out of a steel baashon – utensil, resting on the back of a cycle.
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There’s Ghugni, chickpeas in a yellow gravy, topped with chopped onion and chili and sometimes has mincemeat in it. Then there are the steamed pork momos of Tiretti Bazaar in China Town -which you can only taste if you manage to head over to the Chinese market which starts at 4:30-5 am and shuts by 6.30-7 am. Which you eat while trying to ignore the many-days old oil it’s been fried in, and is dripping off it. (Although if you eat too much Kolkata street food, you’ll just give yourself a heart attack.) No restaurant serves Kolkata street food-the shallow-fried square Mughlai Porotha stuffed with egg or mincemeat and egg, which is then cut up into four equal squares and served up with yesterday’s stale chopped onions and chillies. What the heart craves though, is Kolkata street food. We’ve all become self-sufficient and resourceful and can cook up a mean Bengali meal, replete with kumro bhaja, alu posto, doi ilish, potoler dolma – and the wiser lot, simply order in from the Bengali restaurants and home chefs in their city. Most expat, or probashi, Bengalis I know don’t really miss the food we cook at home during the Pujas. If ever a festival brought people together, it is this one – especially at the food stalls which mushroom up on every street corner, colony pandal and building fête – now that we have condominiums in Calcutta. In fact, entire households travel and eat together at pandals and homes during the Pujas.
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#BENGALI RESTAURANTS NEAR ME DRIVERS#
There is none of that rubbish of eating food only cooked by Brahmins or a Hindu, or not going to the pandal because the maids and drivers will be there. To be fair, Durga Puja is one of those rare religious festivals in India where everyone – cutting across class and caste – can take part equally, thronging to the pandals, inviting each other home, feeding each other. Bengali food is the most nuanced cuisine to ever hit the world. As every Bengali must have told you, Durga Puja is the best festival in India.