There’s nothing like good old home-cooked food and the old world charm of getting together over a meal to share stories, laugh and just have a great time at a pop-up restaurant, where the menu is curated and cooked at home.
At her south Kolkata pop-up home restaurant, 61-year-old Swapna Banerjee garnishes her carefully chosen and caringly cooked traditional Bengali cuisines with intellectual discourse. Her pop-ups, called The Bengal Ghorana, are combined with evening get-togethers and adda (chat) at her house with celebrated poets, dancers, singers and authors. A homemaker and a mother of two working sons, Banerjee offers Kolkata’s food lovers a combined taste of culture and food.
There are soirees, dance, drama, recitation and performances by local intellectual and cultural icons such as poets Joy Goswami, and Srijato Bandyopadhyay, singers Promita Mullick, Riddhi Bandopadhyay, Surojit Chatterjee from folk group Bhoomi, and others.
Relish Madhukheera fish and usher Bengali New Year’s Day a la Mughal style. Madhukheera fish is a Mughal fish preparation, cooked with honey and kheer and simmered with fresh cow milk. It’s an old Bengali recipe from the times of Murshid Kuli Khan (1717-27), the first nawab of Bengal.
At Banerjee’s pop-up restaurant, which she started a year ago, the year begins with celebrating Poush Parbon, a festivity synonymous with pithe, a Bengali sweet delicacy made of rice flour, milk, coconut and jiggery. “We offer a variety of pithe, both spicy and sweet, including some non-vegeterian ones,” says Banerjee. This is followed by Holi, Bengali New Year’s day, Jamai Shosti, Arandhan, Durga Puja, Bhai Pota, among others.
This Valentine’s Day, Banerjee arranged a pop-up for romantic Bengalis who loathe going on typical romantic movie and dinner dates. “We had poet Joy Goswami and his wife, who recited love poems and shared their experiences with the guests over dinner. Singers sang Tagore love songs,” smiles Banerjee. The prices of a vegetarian or non-vegetarian pop-up is Rs 600-800 per person. “These have become so popular that we plan to increase the number of pop-ups in a month,” she states.
Banerjee scours unique and authentic Bengali recipes tucked away in some torn pages of diaries of grandmothers. Most recipes and styles of cooking date back three to four generations. Besides cooking, Banerjee pores over the Internet and reads a lot of history books to research and reinvent lost recipes.
“I collect and preserve recipes with a lot of care. Some have been handed down to me by my grandmother, mother and aunts. Others I have got from family friends. Some were scribbled by my grandmother in her handy cook book,” states Banerjee. All her food is made with spices freshly ground at home; even the ghee is made traditionally at home. Her main thrust is to bring back the lost recipes to a customer’s plate. “There are many dishes such as red meat with coconut, fig curry, padma maner pata bata (a local saag mashed with spices) Bengali-style fish kebab, which people don’t get to eat every day now. I try to replicate them as authentically as possible,” she explains.
There is a touch of Bengali tradition in the way the food is served in customary bell metal utensils.