A Company trading post of 1690 on three river villages became a colonial capital, a printing and reform powerhouse, and then a city that kept the buildings and changed the argument.
1690
Company post
Job Charnock settles the riverbank.
1772
Capital
Seat of British India for 139 years.
1828
Renaissance
Bengal's reform movement takes hold.
1911
Capital moves
The court departs for Delhi.
Price per person₹ under ₹300₹₹ ₹300–1,000₹₹₹ ₹1,000–3,000₹₹₹₹ over ₹3,000
A first-floor hall opposite Presidency College where students argued out most of twentieth-century Bengali politics over cheap coffee.
Order the infusion (black coffee) and a mutton cutlet; sit near the windows for the street below.
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The kebab-in-paratha roll is claimed here, invented in the 1930s for clerks who wanted meat they could carry.
Get the mutton or chicken double-egg roll; it is a quick stop, not a sit-down meal.
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A Swiss confectionery opened on Park Street in 1927, the last working piece of the street's jazz-age decade.
Best for breakfast or tea; the rum balls and chicken patties are the classics.
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A dim, red-lit Park Street restaurant open since 1975, famous for its chelo kebab — Iranian-style rice with kebabs and a fried egg.
No reservations; arrive early or expect a queue at dinner.
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Open since 1956, a Park Street dining room serving Continental classics — deviled crab, chicken à la Kiev and Baked Alaska — the way the city's clubs once did.
Go for lunch to avoid the evening queue.
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Begun as a Swiss-run tearoom and turned into a restaurant with a resident band by new owners in 1959, Trincas helped make Park Street Calcutta's live-music street.
The band plays most evenings; come after 8pm.
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The busiest name in Kolkata biryani — the Awadhi style brought by the exiled Nawab of Lucknow in 1856, cooked with a potato and an egg.
The Park Circus branch is the original; order the mutton biryani and firni.
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Bengali home cooking in an old Ballygunge house, serving a lunch buffet and an à la carte menu of fish and prawn dishes.
Try the daab chingri (prawns cooked in a green coconut).
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A small chain serving Bengali home dishes — shukto, bhetki paturi, chingri malai curry — at fair prices.
Branches differ; the Ekdalia and Esplanade outlets are the most popular.
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A tiny shop at the Shyambazar five-point crossing, cooking kosha mangsho — slow-fried dark mutton — since the 1920s.
Eat it with porota; expect basic seating.
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A cabin restaurant open since 1910, known for fish kabiraji — a cutlet wrapped in a lacy web of fried egg.
Good for a late lunch or evening snack after North Kolkata sightseeing.
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A sherbet shop open since 1918 by College Square, once a meeting place for revolutionaries and later for students and poets.
Order the daab sherbet, made with green coconut.
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A sweet shop founded in 1826, credited with the Lady Kenny — a fried sweet named after Lady Canning, the Governor-General's wife.
Also try the sandesh; the shop keeps an antique wall clock from the 1920s.
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Since 1885, one of the city's best sandesh makers, with seasonal flavors such as nolen gur (date-palm jaggery) in winter.
Come in winter for nolen gur sandesh and baked mishti doi.
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Opened in 1902 by Baghdadi Jewish trader Nahoum Israel Mordecai, this bakery still sells fruitcakes and cheese samosas, a last trace of Kolkata's vanished Jewish community.
At Christmas the plum cakes sell out quickly.
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Founded around 1922 by Chinese immigrant Achumpa Huang as a tiffin house, it is among India's oldest surviving family-run Chinese restaurants, still cooking without hired chefs.
Small and family-run with limited hours — phone ahead and bring cash.
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A dawn pavement market in Kolkata's old Chinatown, where the Hakka and Cantonese community sells pork buns, momos and fish-ball soup.
Go by 7am, ideally on Sunday; it is over by about 8:30am.
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