Kolkata: The City That Feeds You Before You Ask
Kolkata does not wait for you to find food. It finds you. Step off a train at Howrah and within three minutes someone is selling you a kathi roll so good that the Nizam's restaurant on Park Street, which invented it, still draws queues at noon on a Tuesday. The city's street food culture runs on a logic of its own: phuchka is not pani puri, and a Kolkatan will correct you on this with genuine feeling. The tamarind water is sharper, the potato filling is spiced differently, and the whole thing is assembled to order in a way that makes the Mumbai version taste like a memory of the real thing. Beyond phuchka, Kolkata's mishti doi and kosha mangsho define what slow cooking means before the term became fashionable. The city's Chinese quarter in Tiretti Bazaar serves a breakfast of pork congee and fried bread that exists nowhere else in India. Come hungry. Leave stuffed. Plan nothing else for the day.
