If I want to feel like a revolutionary, or a poet, or both, Kolkata's Indian Coffee House (15 Bankim Chatterjee Street) is the place to be. Set in the publishing and university district, this institution (one of numerous branches across the country) occupies the upper floors of the decrepit old building formerly known as Albert Hall.
The dining room, built by the Indian Coffee Workers Cooperative Society Limited, leads to a dank, dark concrete stairwell with age-old flyers flaking off the walls. About 40 small square tables cover the vast floor of the huge, airy room with a two-story ceiling. Seats by the windows catch wonderful morning light, with views to the active street below. Crows perch on an upstairs indoor balcony surrounding the room, eyeing diners below. On the far back wall hangs an old sepia-toned photo of Rabindranath Tagore, Bengal's most prized literary figure.
The restaurant appears, for better and worse, much as it was
in the fading days of British colonial rule.
In decades past, this was a favorite haunt of Kolkata's intellectuals, and it still attracts students and intellectuals who gather for conversation. "The Albert Hall of Coffee House hummed with activity the moment it opened in the morning," writes Swapan Mullick in The Statesman Good Food Guide to Kolkata. "It was here that vegetable pakoras constituted the staple food for all kinds of thought—literary, cinematic, theatrical, or purely academic." The House is quite quiet on a recent morning, but the atmosphere oozes nostalgia.
Inside the kitchen, a man squats on the floor, surrounded by plucked chickens, pounding profusely, mincing the meat on a chopping block. (This is a city in which few women work in public, and almost never at food and drink establishments.) Another man stands nearby, forming all that meat into neat little patties. Breaded chicken cutlet seems to be one of the few foods on offer this morning (no fish, no curry, despite their menu listings). It is served with a drizzle of red sauce, a dollop of Dijon mustard, raw red onion and fried potatoes. The coffee? Weak, brewed like tea. It is reminiscent of the coffee my grandmother used to percolate in her old Milwaukee home.
Perhaps today, the brew is not the reason to visit the Indian Coffee House. Nevermind—the nostalgia is strong enough.