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| (From top): Chefs Sujit Sinha and Subhas Basu cook up a storm at Tangerine; a platter from KK’s Fusion and Pradeep Rozario of the same restaurant; popular dishes from Marco Polo; Bibi Sarkar of Taaja’s with a few of her multicuisine specialities |
Pradeep Rozario is a man moving with the changing times. Eleven years ago, he caught a whiff of the popular mood and the result was Kurry Klub, which quickly became a Calcutta landmark. Now, Rozario has seen the dining tables of the future and he is betting that they will look very different from what was served up in the past. The result is KK?s Fusion. ?People have much more sophisticated tastes today and want to try different things,? says Rozario.
Patrons at the one-and-a-half-month-old restaurant can watch their meals being cooked in the open interactive kitchen where they can make suggestions about how they want their food cooked. They can even step inside Rozario?s cooking lab where the chef holds cooking classes and experiments with recipes like Lentil Risotto. OK, we know, anything with lentils may not sound exotic, but Rosario insists it tastes great.
Rozario is betting that it?s time for Calcutta restaurants to give their menus a facelift. Once upon a time, Calcuttans who ate out usually hailed the nearest waiter and demanded a tandoori naan with a butter chicken or rogan josh or some other Mughlai concoction. Or, when they were feeling more adventurous and wanted something different, they made a special day out by tucking into fried noodles with Indianised Chinese chop suey.
Today?s well-travelled diner is a very different animal and he?s willing to try everything from Thai green curry to sushi ? which is more than just raw fish in case you squeamish folk were wondering.
So, you have KK?s Fusion, and Crystal Cuisine, a 46-seater restaurant which opened in Central Calcutta in October. Also another addition to the eating out landscape is Sourav Ganguly?s giant four-storey 370-seater that?s divided into a bar and three different restaurants. The second-floor restaurant, Over Boundary, and the lounge bar serve up everything from Thai food to steaks and other Western fare.
Even a few years back, risottos and paellas, au gratin and steaks were mainly limited to the coffeeshops and restaurants of five-star hotels; of course, except for a few select restaurants in and around Park Street.
But today, almost every nook and corner boasts a multicuisine restaurant. In fact, there has been an explosion of such establishments in the past few months.
Now, for anyone who wants to eat out ? and doesn?t fancy the standard Mughlai fare ? the options on the menu have been expanding faster than you can turn up the gas. There is, for instance, the Red Kitchen and Lounge in Alipore or China Bistro on Ripon Street that serves up an unusual mix of Chinese and Italian cuisine. If that?s not enough choice, there are restaurants like Fire ?? Ice, Indthalia, Seven Heavens and The Orbit that all offer multicuisine menus.
The city?s older restaurateurs have also sensed the changing tastebuds of their clients and struck out in new directions. Earlier this year, Bunti Sethi, who runs the Winning Streak nightclub, opened Star Struck, a multicuisine restaurant on the fourth floor of Forum.
Of course, the move towards global cuisine has been gathering steam for some time, with restaurants like Taaja?s, Jong?s, Tangerine and Vatika that have been drawing customers to their tables for several years. But these older restaurants are now facing stiff competition from newcomers throwing open their doors nearly every other week.
In their kitchens, these new restaurateurs are dishing up everything from Mexican and Italian to Lebanese, Thai and even Mediterranean. But they are hedging their bets by offering a medley of cuisines in a bid to appeal to as wide a range of customers as possible.
Take Taaja?s, for instance, which is one of the city?s older multicuisine restaurants. It offers a round-the-world choice of cuisines. Starting in the Far East with Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, it moves on to Continental with Spanish, Greek and Italian fare and if that?s not enough, also offers Cajun food from down home in Louisiana. This apart, there?s also an Indian menu that includes tandoori, Bengali and Chettinad.
Others, too, are moving to offer globe-trotting choices. At three-year-old Vatika, restaurateur Prabir Singhania decided to offer customers everything from tortillas to pastas and naan. His menu includes Mexican, Italian and Indian dishes.
So what has produced this departure in dining out tastes from the traditional tandoori naan, butter chicken, rogan josh routine? Chefs say it is a consequence of people travelling abroad more and being exposed to new flavours and foods. ?Changes in our lifestyle have made this inevitable,? says Bibi Sarkar of Taaja?s, a 56-seater eatery, one of the earliest to bet on changing appetites. ?People are just travelling more and getting exposed to different tastes.?
?All this travel has exposed people to cuisines from all parts of the world. So when they come back home, they want to try out some of the same dishes,? says Kallol Banerjee, manager, Marco Polo restaurant which dishes up Mediterranean, Continental and Indian fare.
The advent of the jet-setting Indian has created much more sophisticated palates, says Sarkar. She recalls how she had to educate her clients back in the mid-80s. ?I had to advise them on their choice of food and also assure them that they didn?t have to pay if they didn?t like the taste,? she says. ?But now, my clients are more informed,? she sighs with relief.
Also the level of ?foodie? awareness has grown with innumerable cooking shows on TV and cooking columns in magazines and newspapers, making patrons want to try out new dishes.
Of course, it isn?t only the menu that has changed at the new crop of restaurants that are making their presence felt in the city. The d?cor has been updated from the mid-?50s chic that was so popular in many of the city'?s top eateries. Sourav?s, for instance, is all glass, with coloured, hidden lighting while Taaja?s is a split-level restaurant with a bistro-like ambience and featuring an eclectic combination of paintings.
At Tangerine, which is three-years-old, the d?cor is in cheery orange and yellow and there?s a bar. Like KK?s Fusion, it has an interactive kitchen where diners can walk over to the centre of the restaurant, pick out their own ingredients and have them turned into global-style delicacies.
What?s on the menu in these new restaurants? Some like KK?s offer all types of far-flung choices and come up with some great combinations. Rozario recounts how he once served an Indian khichdi topped with fried fish and with a tongue-burning Sichuan Chinese sauce on the side. ?The customer liked it so much that I made it a part of my fusion menu and called it Lentil Risotto,? says Rozario.
There are, of course, limits to inventiveness and one man?s fusion may not necessarily appeal to others. Marco Polo?s Banerjee relates an incident about a customer who wanted his pasta dish ?sprinkled with sliced raw onion and served with roasted poppadums?.
Starting multicuisine restaurants and producing exotic fare for the table is also a lot less tough than it used to be. Once upon a time, would-be restaurateurs would have had difficulty finding the ingredients for many of their more international recipes. Now that all has changed with suppliers stocking many more products.
?Not only is it easier to source authentic ingredients, it has also facilitated exchanges of expertise,? says Devender Singh, manager, Zaranj, which specialises in Oriental and Indian cuisines. Three years ago, Zaranj opened a new section serving Chinese, Thai and Japanese food named Jong?s.
Still, is the food that calls itself Lebanese, Italian or Spanish really true to their homelands? Restaurateurs says they often do have to tinker with the flavour a bit to suit local palates. ?Unless it is modified to the Indian taste, the dish will not have very many takers,? says Prabir Singhania, owner of Vatika.
The result is what culinary experts call ?glocalisation? ? food with a global concept and a local touch. Says chef Subhas Basu of Tangerine, ?We often need to make our Continental dishes tangier than normal to cater to local tastes.?
And we have to acknowledge that when our tastebuds globetrot, they aren?t yet that far-ranging. Restaurateurs in Calcutta still say that if the patron has to opt for something non-Indian from the menu, most will still opt for Chinese.
Also while there is a new well-travelled generation that is willing to dine out adventurously and is looking for the world on the menu-card, many Calcutta diners still like to know they can have Indian fare when they want. Says Basu, ?People like to try new things but at the end of the day, they want to feel they can eat what they have always eaten.?
Hence, unlike say in Delhi or Mumbai, where there are many restaurants that dare to go solo with a single-nation cuisine, in Calcutta, multicuisine menus are far more popular.
?Being multicuisine is commercially viable. If you are in the business, you don?t want to take risks. That?s a reason why our menus always have an Indian section ? because the local cuisine will always have takers,? says Dibyendu Ghosh, one of the partners of the newly-opened Crystal Cuisine on Park Street.
Still, says food critic Nondon Bagchi, while, ?the general public sticks to their traditional tastes and people are creatures of habit, they will slowly catch on to new tastes. Evolution takes its own time.? He adds: ?There are some establishments in Calcutta where authentic Continental food gets precedence over Indian or Chinese, for example in Mocambo and Blue Fox.?
In the meantime, whether you hanker for foreign or home-style fare, it?s time to step out in Calcutta because there?s a whole world ? and we mean it literally ? of dining experiences out there to taste.
