At Trincas, Usha Uthup Sings To A Kolkata That Still Knows Every Word

There are restaurants you remember for the food, and then there are places where the room itself seems to have a memory. Trincas, on Kolkata’s Park Street, belongs to the latter. 

I was recently invited there for an afternoon of music, food and drinks, with Usha Uthup, now 78 years old, at the centre of it all. The mood was warm and informal, and it did not take long for the afternoon to turn into something of a collective sing-along. 

Uthup spoke about her love for Kolkata and, particularly, for Trincas, a venue that has been closely tied to her journey for decades. 

“Trincas is my mandir, my masjid, my girjaa,” she said. 

And then came the music.

When The Room Began To Sing 

Uthup moved effortlessly through songs that many in the room clearly knew by heart—Shaan Se, Ramba Ho, Nache Nache, Hari Om Hari and Ek Main Aur Ek Tu. People sang along, clapped and danced. There was little distance between performer and audience; the room simply joined in. The vibe was kind of electrifying. 

Her association with Trincas goes back more than five decades. It was here that she made her live debut in 1969, beginning a relationship between singer and venue that has become part of Park Street folklore. Usha Uthup recalled that this was also where she would perform before a star-studded gathering: Sharmila Tagore and Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi on one side, Uttam Kumar and Supriya Devi on the other, and many other luminaries all around. And this was also the place where she met her second husband.  

Food kept arriving between songs. The spread was generous, accompanied by mocktails, with lobster Thermidor, their legendary fish fry with tartar sauce, among the dishes served. Yet, even with a table full of food, attention kept returning to the stage. 

A Place Built Out Of Memories 

Trincas opened on Park Street in 1927 and will turn 100 next year. Over the decades, it has watched Kolkata’s nightlife change around it while retaining something increasingly rare—the idea that dining and live music can belong naturally together. 

The restaurant has also revived an older Park Street tradition of several live music sessions through the day, with performances spanning different genres. 

There is also something deliberately old-fashioned about the way Trincas approaches live music today. In the 1960s, Park Street moved to the rhythm of the day: morning coffee sessions slipped into lunchtime performances, followed by tea dances and late-evening, post-theatre shows. That culture gradually disappeared as restaurants turned to recorded music. Trincas is now bringing the format back, with four live music sessions through the day across different genres. Its newest addition, Island Breeze, plays weekday lunch sets that move through Latin, swing, bossa nova and reggae—giving the old Park Street ritual a younger, breezier voice. 

For Anand Puri, the third generation of his family to run Trincas, preserving the place is not simply about maintaining a restaurant. 

“If you roughly count the number of people whose lives this place has touched over 99 years, you will run into the millions,” he says. Those memories, he adds, range from birthdays and first dates to 50th anniversaries, first dances and favourite haunts. 

“It feels like I must respect those memories when taking decisions about how it functions today.” 

Puri describes Trincas as “a legend made up of stories,” a place that almost every Calcutta (old name of Kolkata) family seems to have heard about, visited or inherited a memory of. 

That perhaps explains its appeal even to younger audiences. They may not have known the Park Street of the 1960s or 1970s, but they can still walk into the same room, hear live music and become part of its continuing story. 

By the end of the afternoon, that was what stayed with me. Trincas does not preserve nostalgia behind glass. It lets people eat, sing and dance inside it—and, in doing so, keeps adding new memories to an old Kolkata institution.