City of joyful eating

Who would have thought that Kolkata would turn into one of India's great restaurant cities?

- VIR SANGHVI

One of the many things that the good citizens of Calcutta disagree with the rest of us about is the quality of the restaurant food in their city. They think it is fabulous. We think it is mediocre.

I have to confess that till I went eating in Cal a couple of weeks ago, I was in the latter camp.

My views on the food in Cal were shaped by my experiences when I lived there. The Bengali food at restaurants was mediocre: to eat well you had to go to private houses. (It helped that my then boss Aveek Sarkar's wife, the art curator Rakhi Sarkar, made the best food in town so, it was easier to cadge invitations from them than go to Bengali restaurants.) There was vaguely authentic Chinese food in Chinatown but the Cal Chinese were, after so many generations, more Bengali than Chinese. The food in Tangra was usually completely inauthentic, and later, influenced by Punjabi Chinese.

So, I followed a simple policy. I ate in the streets where the food was always good and stuck to a few downmarket places, including Nizam's and the other roll makers. (The roll is Calcutta's greatest and most unrecognised contribution to our cuisine.) Cal biryani was not the craze it has now become but there were some good places.

Then, a funny thing happened. I moved to Delhi and suddenly, the Cal food scene exploded. It was almost as if they were waiting for me to leave before they started making the good stuff.

As you may have guessed from my recent columns, I am on a quest to find the best restaurants in the country. So far, I have done Gurgaon (the less said about that the better) and Bangalore (not bad at all) and I am going to Goa next. But of all the cities I have tried, there is no doubt that Calcutta beats the hell out of the rest.

EARLIER, THE BENGALI FOOD IN RESTAURANTS WAS MEDIOCRE. THERE WAS VAGUELY AUTHENTIC CHINESE FOOD IN CHINATOWN BUT IT WAS MORE BENGALI THAN CHINESE