Thursday, September 18, 2008

Oh Calcutta : Calcutta Chapter

This post is right up The Knife's ally!

A friend and I went to Oh Calcutta for dinner. I was surprised at the differences in the menu between Oh Calcutta in Mumbai & Calcutta.

The Mumbai restaurant offers a wide range of chicken & mutton dishes where as the menu in the Calcutta restaurant is overloaded with fish. Understandably so.

We started our dinner with Fish Fingers. The Mumbai restaurant serves a pungent mustard sauce with the fish, called Kasundi. It goes very well with fish fry & fish fingers. But the Calcutta restaurant served a sauce that was a mix of mustard, mayonnaise & sweet mango chutney. It tasted good too.

For main course we ordered Boneless Hilsa, or Ilish as it's also called, and Chittagong Chicken along with steamed rice.

Ilish is a delicacy fish that is available only during certain times of the year. It lives in sea water for the most part but can travel upto 1200km inland to deposit it's eggs. Fresh water Ilish is supposed to taste better than salt water Ilish. In India, Ilish is found in the Ganges near the Bay of Bengal and in the Narmada river in Gujarat, where it is known by another name. It is oilier and therefore heavier than other types of fresh water fish but is supposed to be tastier as well. Also, it smells less pungent than other types of fish. The Ilish we ordered came in a mustard gravy which went very well with steamed rice.

The Chittagong Chicken however was a far cry from the mildly flavored Ilish. It was spicy as can be! It was a Bangladeshi dish with a tomato & onion gravy & plenty of red chilli powder!!

Overall, we had a nice meal and rounded it off with a bowl of mishti doi :)

2 comments:

Kalyan Karmakar said...

Oh Cal is my lifeline here. My favoured joint to treat people. I have been to Bangladesha few times and was shocked to see they prepare eelish with onion. I got some great eelish from Khar market recently and fried the last of it recently. heaven.

Scarlett said...

Ilist tastes better than other fish. I was surprised to find that it was oily & heavy. Bangladeshis cook food very differently. Even in Cal, Bongs from Bangladesh & Bongs from Bengal cook very differently.