The Epic City by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-08-17T04:00:00+00:00

***

It had taken me a few tries before I found Allen Kitchen Restaurant in Sovabazar. For one thing, they are only open four hours a day, less if the food runs out. For another, they are more kitchen than restaurant. Allen is a throwback to the old-style Bengali ‘cabin’, with bare wooden tables and benches in the back, a tiny sink, and bulbs that are hardly more candescent than the kerosene lamps we used during power cuts in my childhood.

Shrimp sells at astronomical prices in Maniktala Market, because the best stuff is exported to Europe or America. The coveted delicacy can still be found on plates during special occasions, like Jamai Shosti (the festival of the son-in-law) or a championship win of the Mohun Bagan football team. But the shrimp cutlet, the prince of street-food during my childhood, has morphed beyond recognition. What has replaced it in most Calcutta establishments is a mound of batter packed with filling of questionable provenance, deep fried in shortening with a fantail sticking out. The tail may be the only part of the cutlet that originates from a shrimp.

Not at Allen. Each evening, the Saha brothers, who run Allen, make sixty-five shrimp cutlets and not one more. The shrimp sits in an icebox. Upon ordering, they are butterflied and then gently hammered into a flat cutlet shape, then battered and fried. No shortening, nor even vegetable oil, is used. At Allen, the shrimp cutlets are fried in pure ghee.

Nostalgia is the feeling that always disappoints. The taste of something you remember from your childhood can almost never be recovered as an adult. The flavour is gone. The shrimp cutlets at Allen tasted like my childhood, only better. They were so delicious I could simply eat the batter alone. No filler, no skimping, no corners cut. It was a thing of beauty.

The man who worked the fryer wore a white T-shirt stretched taut over a substantial belly. He looked like he could have been grilling burgers at White Rose System back home in Jersey. Allen was run almost like a speakeasy, known only by worth of mouth. There was a mention of the place in an article in the weekend section of Anandabazar, the Bengali daily, which was how I had heard of it, I said to him.

He shrugged. Many such write-ups had come out, he said.

Why didn’t they have them framed and adorning the turmeric walls? I asked, as was the norm in most eateries.

‘We’re not into that,’ he said.

‘Why don’t you fry more than sixty-five a night?’ I asked.

‘This is enough for us.’

I felt like a philistine for suggesting they prostitute their God-given talent at making a shrimp cutlet into an enriching scheme. It was as if my logic, which demanded that a business seek to maximise profit, advertise and accumulate, was flawed. Frying shrimp cutlets was less an enterprise than a pastime, something to do between tea and dinner time, in a shack, with sixty-five shrimp. There was a momentary pleasure in a job done well.

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