The first floor of Charnock City, where Salt Lake used to shop for its first open-shelf supermarket experience since 1997, will now house a restaurant, serving Asian food with the focus on Chinese cuisine. The supermarket had downed shutters two years ago.

The name of the eatery — Silver Screen Asia — as well as the decor draw from food-inspired moments in films. “We have another restaurant opposite Indrapuri Studio in Tollygunge where we had explored the theme. When Anirban Sengupta, our new partner in the venture, visited the restaurant, he wanted to extend the theme to our Salt Lake restaurant as well,” said Pradip Kumar Mukherjee, the chief executive officer of Charnock City Enterprise. “This will be the start of a chain,” he added.

“I have always been passionate about food and films,” smiled Sengupta, a veteran of two decades in the hospitality industry. “We have taken the food-inspired moments in iconic films like Sarey Chuattor, Goopi Gyne Bagha Byne, The Hundred Foot Journey, Julie and Julia, Ratatouille etc as our theme.” The place mats as well as the glass fronts of the pillars therefore carry the relevant scenes from such films.

“We also plan to hold cinema-related events like discussions and screenings here,” Mukherjee added.

The 70-seater will open on February 22 with a novel offer. “We want our customers to decide how we should price our dishes,” said Sengupta. So for the first three days, the menu will not carry any prices. A customer, he says, would be free to pay whatever he wants to based on his satisfaction. 

At a tasting session on Tuesday, the restaurant served some signature dishes like Oriental Soup with Chicken & Prawn, Crispy vegetable Chilli Plum, Chilli Chicken, Chilli Basil Fish, Shanghai Chicken and Farmhouse Pork. 

So delicious was each dish that the customers who walk in on the opening day are likely to write cheques for handsome  amounts.