I’m currently in Kolkata on a trip to see family. The city is not the most dynamic or well-known metropolis of India but holds a certain charm if you are able to understand the eccentricities of Bengali culture. I’m going to try and document some of the eating options around here. I believe @MyAnnoyingOpinions has already written a lot about eating out in Kolkata in their blog.
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Looking forward to your travel report! Love how we can be armchair travelers with so many of our members out & about the world over 
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Within a few hours of arriving, we were dragged out by family to go shopping (not really my fave activity), so around midday we broke for our first outside snack/meal at the food court of the shopping mall. This is a South Indian fast food chain called Vaango! (the exclamation mark is theirs, not mine). My son and husband ordered plain and masala Dosa respectively. I had idli (only 2 idlis per order - what!?!) and a regular South Indian filter coffee. My mum went for a ‘mini plate’ which was a ‘mini dosa’ and a small filter coffee.
The idlis were ok - not as soft and pillowy as they might be. Dosas were probably the best bet - good colour on them. The mini one is about half the size of a regular one. The sambhar dal and chutneys were excellent - we would come back just on the basis of these. The coffee was ok. In the promotional material on the screens in the food court they show it served in steel cups but in reality they use paper cups, which detracts from the whole South Indian filter coffee experience in my opinion. The other thing was the service was agonisingly slow but this might just be a Bengali thing. My mum has the embarrassing habit of hanging around the counter asking the man to hurry up with the order, while my husband was grumbling that she needed to stop doing that or his dosa would end up pale and floppy.
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I can’t wait to see more photos! Enjoy your stay!
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I’ve only had dosas twice so far, the first time at a street food market in Berlin with a delicious spicy chicken filling, the second time recently with a (to me) strange side of potatoes & carrots. Is that a common side/accoutrement for dosas?
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Thanks @Phoenikia !
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@linguafood - you must be under some sort of carrot curse 
. I know your recent trip to Sicily was beset by caponata containing carrots. Carrots might be added to the sambhar dal accompanying dosa but is generally not part of the potato curry which is the filling in a ‘masala dosa’. Dosa traditionalists would also say chicken isn’t really an authentic accompaniment. But dosa is so insanely popular that every sort of topping or accompaniment has been tried by restaurants to entice customers.
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I’m a big fan of a masala dosa. And Mrs H an even bigger fan. I’ve heard that there’s a cafe in a nearby suburb which just does dosas and idlis which I hope to try out soon
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The first evening, we didn’t feel like eating a big meal so picked up some snacks from a well-known local confectioner’s which also does savouries.
I forgot to take photos. We took home 3 samosas (called shingara in Bengali), 2 mochar chop (breaded ovals filled with a dry spicy prep of banana blossom and potato), 2 paneer butter cutlets (slabs of paneer coated with a thin layer of spiced mashed potato, breaded and fried), 2 narkol naru (ball shaped sweets made of fresh grated coconut and jaggery) and 2 mango doi (small clay pots filled with set yogurt flavoured with mango puree and baked). All of this came to less than £4. We shared it all for dinner and heated up the savoury snacks in a dry frying pan to crisp them up. No photos, sorry. I’ll try to add them later as we’ll probably go there again.
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This is the run up to the biggest festival in the Bengali Hindu calendar - Durga Puja - a 5 day festival dedicated to the 10-armed warrior goddess Durga. Bengalis have a cultural tradition where this fearsome mother goddess is considered a daughter of the collective Bengali consciousness and every autumn she leaves her Himalayan abode where she resides with her reclusive husband the god Shiva, to visit her own father’s home (her father’s home is the entire Bengali Hindu consciousness?) for 5 days with her 4 children (who are themselves senior gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon). So these 5 days are an intense celebration of her annual visit. But just as Christmas has become extremely commercialised in the West, Durga Puja is insanely commercialised in West Bengal and the festival is used to flog everything from healthcare to steel pipes to underwear. The most common things being flogged of course are clothes, food and jewelry. The malls we went to already have displays of the goddess, which would send any strict Hindu into an apoplectic fit. For us, it’s nice to see a few displays as we will be missing the actual festival this year.
With kids arrayed around her.
Without the kids.
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Trip to the Oxford book store in Park Street. The store has a cafe on the upper level, called cha bar.
There was an extensive menu of teas:
These are only a few pages of a menu with around 10 pages devoted to just tea.
But we were in the mood for coffee. The coffee menu was only a page. But they did offer a few varieties of South Indian coffee. I had the blend from Coorg, served in traditional South Indian filter coffee style. Hmmm…maybe a bit fancier as you might see from my photo:
My husband who is wilting a bit in the heat and humidity, opted for cold coffee, which was sort of like an intense coffee milkshake, but not too sweet:
There were lots of snacks on the menu but we didn’t eat anything here.
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Do you like carrot halwah?
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Yeah, this was a separate bowl. The potato/carrot mix seemed so strangely… Northern European to me.
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I have a nice Indian coffee shop within walking distance of my Toronto apartment. I might copy your vacation coffee orders 
Orders inspired by @medgirl!
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For lunch we wanted to do a tasting menu at Aaheli, which is a high-end Bengali restaurant at the Peerless Hotel on Chowringhee, a central main avenue of the city. But they weren’t serving the menu we were interested in, so we opted to do the lunch buffet at Oceanic, another restaurant in the same hotel. This was Indian ‘multi-cuisine’ - an array of different kinds of food ranging from classic North Indian to Desi Chinese.
The service here was impeccable - we would not have understood what was available to us without the expert input from the incredibly polite and attentive staff. There was a large array of hot and cold dishes laid out buffet style. I felt awkward taking photos here. On one side were lots of freshly cut vegetables in the style of a salad bar, with a platter of dahi vada (chickpea dumplings in a yogurt sauce, served room temp or even a bit chilled) and a cauldron of lemon coriander soup. I didn’t try any of those things as I’m a wuss when it comes to buffets. On the hot end was a series of large Le Cruset style casserole dishes containing steamed rice, ‘burnt garlic’ noodles (burnt garlic seems to be the new craze in Desi Chinese cuisine), tarka dal, saga paneer, mixed vegetable lapata curry, potato and aubergine in a dry curry, a Bengali prep of kalia fish with mustard sauce, a dry chicken curry (chicken lababdar, iirc).
I composed a plate with some rice, dal, saag paneer and potato and aubergine curry:
Everything was excellent - the potato and aubergine was my fave.
My husband was chatting to the servers in the meantime and realised that they bring stuff to your table. He didn’t really say no to anything. So we got a seemingly endless procession of hot food delivered to our table by a server at regular intervals.
Mini garlic naan - piping hot, crisp and light.
Chicken kebab with coriander chutney. I was sure I had taken a photo but can’t find it now.
Crispy chilli baby corn. Baby corn battered, fried and coated in a hot and sweet glaze - this was our least favourite.
Mini vegetable chops (a spiced vegetable mash of mainly potato, carrot and beetroot, formed into an.oval patty, breaded and fried). I didn’t try these but my husband said they were almost identical to his mum’s.
Fish fingers. We initially said no, thinking these would be like fish sticks but boy were we mistaken. The server had faith in his product and insisted he serve us a few, and brought us some fresh lime slices to squeeze over. These were substantial fingers of bhetki (a local white fish) with a very subtly spiced and crisp breading, perfectly fried. I forgot to take a photo because we polished them off quickly. The server brought us several more portions which we inhaled. These were the best thing we have eaten so far on this trip.
We were then brought a massive bowl of mutton (goat) biryani. This had around 5 large pieces of goat which was not very bony at all, and very tender. This biryani was pretty perfect in my book, greaseless, aromatic, perfectly fried onions and a perfectly separate extra long grains of basmati.
Close up of biryani:
There were a few desserts available which were like petit fours - some traditional Bengali sweet and some tiny fancy decorated sponge cakes. My husband sampled a few. I went to the restroom and when I came back a small scoop of vanilla ice-cream in a cold steel ice cream dish was on my placemat. The server had brought it for me.
All of this came to around £15 per head, which is super good value for the excellent service, nice ambience in a high-end hotel and the quality and quantity of food on offer. For some reason, my husband and I received separate bills. I think we’ve arrived at that stage in married life when we’re so lacking in the lovey dovey we get handed separate bills.
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I’m not a huge fan of carrot halwa. It’s very much a North Indian sweet. I’m not a fan of Indian sweets in general. Do you have a favourite?
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Postscript re the buffet experience: the server brought a second big bowl of biryani to our table. I said, we already have a bowl. He smiled and said “Well, that was for sir and this is for you ma’am”. I said please don’t give us any more, it will just end up wasted. We couldn’t even finish the entirety of the first bowl; sadly we left a few spoonfuls of the delectable rice.
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Maybe they thought it might appeal to the local palate?
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I think he and I would get on well.
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That lunch sounds so good!
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