Oh, The Food!

I’ve been asked to write sometimes about food. Kolkata is still an incredible bargain for such a large city, especially compared with Mumbai or Delhi. Great street food like the freshly made chicken egg rolls available at stalls on almost every street, rather like getting a taco from a taco truck in LA. A great light meal for about 50¢. The dhaba down the street, a small open-front restaurant specializing in tandoori, kebabs and dense, plain but very tasty curry dishes served fast. Usually run by Sikhs from what I have seen here. I had a half tandoori chicken (the chickens are very small), dal tarka, and a couple of rumali roti – large but very thin bread (rumali means “handkerchief”) – for a late dinner after coming from a concert for less than 100 rupees, or $2. These are the type of place that most foreigners would probably not see unless they had local friends, or might even panic at the thought of going to, but they are very clean and totally cool. Although there are lots of very fancy places in town where you can drop as much money as you would going out anywhere else in the world, many very nice regular restaurants are also first rate – South Indian, Chinese, Bengali – you could never get real Bengali food in the past unless you were invited to someone’s home. Now there are a growing number of places with a middle class clientele, which I suppose is an indicator of a shift in both economics and cultural attitudes.