18 May,2018 07:53 AM IST | Mumbai | Shunashir Sen
Chef Cham Hun Chakap plates a portion of chilli chicken. Chilli chicken is one of the spicier dishes that can be traced back to Tangra. But the food of the Kolkata locality is often a lot sweeter than other Indo-Chinese dishes because that's how the Bengalis prefered it. This can be evidenced in something like honey chilli potato.
Chef Cham Hun Chakap moves around the kitchen with the assurance of a well-set batsman completing a comfortable single down to deep midwicket. He is running the show behind the scenes at a restaurant in an upscale Powai hotel, which is hosting an event called Tangra Festival. The dish that the chef is whipping up for us is chilli chicken, possibly the most ubiquitous item in the culinary spectrum of Indo-Chinese dishes. And he tells us that it was invented in Tangra, the new Chinatown in Kolkata, considered by many to be the Mecca of this particular cuisine.
Tangra does indeed occupy a unique spot in the country's food-scape. It all goes back to about 100 years ago, when the British - along with Kolkata's older Chinese community in Tirreti Bazaar - established the area, setting up leather factories there to manufacture boots and other goods for soldiers at the battlefront during World War I. Business picked up further during World War II. But then, the British packed their bags in 1947. So, the Chinese community took over the tanning operations. Their life ambled comfortably along, only to be turned upside down by the Indo-China war of 1962, when many indigenous Chinese people immigrated to safer havens like Canada, Australia and Taiwan. And suddenly, the community in Kolkata found its numbers to have considerably dwindled.
Food to the rescue
What's worse is that the ones who were left behind, and who had picked up the mantle of the leather business from their predecessors, found themselves on the wrong side of the law after the state government deemed the tanning industry to be an environmental hazard in the mid-'90s. A large number of factories thus faced closure, with some being shifted to the nearby neighbourhood of Bantala. Many of the owners faced overnight financial ruin. So, to get out of the soup they found themselves in, they turned their attention to another business that had been gaining momentum in the area over the '70s and '80s - restaurants serving "Chinese" dishes.
"Initially, these restaurants were serving the authentic cuisine of the Chinese mainland. But that did not suit the palate of Kolkata's Bengalis, who found it to be too bland. So the restaurants were running in losses in the beginning, till their owners decided to alter the recipes, adding Indian herbs and flavours," chef Cham says, adding that this formed the genesis of what we call Chindian cuisine.
Illustration/Ravi Jadhav
These dishes, of course, bore as much resemblance to true-blue Chinese food as idli-sambar does to tandoori chicken. Instead of being stir-fried, for instance, most of the preparations were gravy-based. The spice quotient was also so much higher than a Shanghai local would put his chopsticks down to fan his mouth after one bite. Plus, while something like a Peking duck is roasted over a length of time, Tangra food was geared to suit the purposes of the quick-service restaurants there. This automatically also meant that the meat - including the fish items - was almost invariably diced into pieces, instead of being served whole, like some of the dishes in mainland China.
Pan-Indian acceptance
Be that as it may, the cuisine gradually started spreading to other parts of the country. Nelson Wang, a Tangra local who opened SoBo's China Garden in 1984, is widely credited with having invented chicken Manchurian, a dish which if you say is Chinese, you might also say that the giant panda is India's national animal. Punjabis also caught on to the trend, developing a brand of Sino-Ludhianvi dishes. And with time, Indo-Chinese food became a mainstay of restaurants in various cities, including Mumbai, where lunch home menus reserve equal space for "Chinese" dishes as they do for stuff like chana masala and aloo matar.
The credit for this goes to the original restaurateurs of Tangra who Indianised their indigenous dishes. But things are no longer hunky-dory in the Kolkata neighbourhood, says Dominic Lee, a fourth-generation Tangra local. "Many of the smaller restaurants are finding it difficult to sustain themselves, with only the bigger eateries, which have space for parking, constantly managing to upgrade themselves because they have the requisite capital," he tells us, adding that the recent controversy around dubious meat being supposedly sold in the city's restaurants has led to a further dip in fortunes.
Nonetheless, he continues, the legacy of the cuisine has left a permanent imprint on the history of India's food. Take chilli chicken, something so popular that it's travelled all the way from the humble Kolkata locality to the swish Powai hotel where chef Cham is making us his version of it. But when he is done in a matter of mere minutes, he recognises the look of doubt on our face after we have had a taste. "I have to make a blander variety because most of our customers are from the West, and they wouldn't be able to handle something too spicy," he explains, revealing how Indo-Chinese cuisine of the Tangra variety is a preserve of only our own countrymen.
Looking for it anywhere else in the world would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, for all practical purposes.
Awesome sauce
A huge contribution that Tangra has had is popularising the concept of chilli sauce. "You will find it in all the kathi roll shops dotted around Kolkata. But before we added it to our food to suit Indian taste buds, people had no clue about it," says Lee.
Till May 27, 7 pm
To 11.30 pm
AT Emperor's Court, Renaissance Mumbai Convention Centre Hotel, near Chinmayanand Ashram, Powai.
Call 8291165421
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