Pet Puja

There are foodies who have lived in Calcutta all their lives but never heard of Rajasthan Guest House. That’s unforgiveable! It’s a tiny place, hidden away in a maze of tyre shops and transport companies, that serves the best Marwari food we’ve had this side of Jaipur. Which is not surprising, considering that Calcutta is the second capital of Rajasthan. (Sorry, bad joke.)

Its kesari pink tiled walls won’t win any interior design awards, but the food is brilliant. Their speciality is the traditional ker sangri they serve on Sundays, but we had a memorable lunch of gatte ka saag, wonderfully flavoured with methi and zeera, and a rich, buttery paneer masala, with chunks of extremely fresh paneer. We tucked into these with crisp, biscuity missi rotis and thick, layered Rajasthani rotis—taking swigs of frothy lassi in between. At adjacent tables were Burrabazaar traders speaking cryptically into cell-phones as they ate, and we tried to imagine which of them might be a future Lakshmi Mittal. At another table were dowagers in chiffons and pearls, who could have been related to the Khaitan or Bajoria clans.

The restaurant is part of a venerable old guest-house, and Mr Sikhwal, the proprietor (whose waist-line suggests that he’s one of his own best customers) informed us that his cooks are generally from Rajasthan, but his head cook, interestingly, is a Bihari. We enjoyed a series of pleasantly zeera-flavoured burps right through the afternoon. Hari om!