My love for regional Chinese food is insatiable and never-ending. I’ve demolished fair portions of it in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, and Los Angeles and San Luis Obispo counties.
Over the two years I’ve lived on the Central Coast, I’ve mourned the closure of Mandarin Gourmet and felt puzzled by the enigma that is Golden Gong in SLO, I’ve strongly disliked the Panda Express chain, and I was won over by Golden Moon in Arroyo Grande. I know there’s more local American Chinese fare to taste, but when I miss my first home back in Calcutta, it’s Indo-Chinese cooking I crave the most.
Specifically, Bar-B-Q. Yes, my favorite Chinese restaurant of all time is called Bar-B-Q, and it doesn’t serve anything remotely close to the barbecue Americans are familiar with.
I recently returned to Bar-B-Q after five days of travel across the world and nearly four years of living away from the city I grew up in. That night in mid May, nostalgia hit me as soon as I stepped into the restaurant’s cool, dark wood interiors dimly bathed in golden light. The fragrant scent of ginger, garlic, chilies, and soy welcomed me, quickly followed by the restaurant manager who I remember greeting alongside my family since I was in kindergarten.
Our waiter placed menu cards on our table mats topped with descriptions of all the Chinese zodiac signs. I didn’t need to look at the menu. I had been plotting my order for a month. Still, I opened the booklet and scanned the gallery of options.
Home to a wave of Chinese immigrants who sought refuge in India roughly 250 years ago from famines and a civil war, Calcutta has a bustling Chinatown district that blends personalities of both cultures. Different Chinese sub-communities settled in the Tangra and Tiretti areas of the city, and established livelihoods in the leather and tanning, carpentry, and dentistry industries. Food, however, became the most popular and longstanding bridge between the Chinese and Indian residents.
Take Bar-B-Q’s mixed fried rice, for example. “Mixed” is the Indo-Chinese counterpart of the American Chinese “combination” label. Unlike most fried rice that’s made with short grain rice, Bar-B-Q’s version uses the long grain basmati. Devoid of peas and carrots, it’s strewn with shrimp, chicken, pork, scrambled eggs, and scallions.
Most of the fare is Hakka style. It’s a lesser-known regional Chinese cuisine that contends with its more popular cousins like the Sichuan, Cantonese, and Hunan varieties. According to Calcutta-based Chinese chef Katherine Chung for Outlook India, Hakka translates to “guest people” and the often soy-based food is considered to be a rustic form of Cantonese cooking.
Bar-B-Q’s mixed Hakka noodles is my favorite main dish at the restaurant. The soy-tinted noodles are glossy and packed with thin slivers of spicy green chilies, chicken, pork, shrimp, cabbage, and shredded carrots. I paired it with multiple sides: sliced chili pork, spicy and flaky red pepper fish with a crunchy shallot-garlic topping, and a battered lollipop chicken dish called Drums of Heaven.
But Hakka noodles aren’t authentic to the cuisine. According to Chung, it was devised by the Chinese cooks in Calcutta to cater to the local love for noodles. Even beyond the walls of Bar-B-Q, Hakka noodles are beloved in fine dining joints, greasy spoon eateries, and the stalls of street food vendors.
Like Hakka cuisine in Calcutta, Bar-B-Q also morphed over the years to adapt to the city’s tastebuds. Bar-B-Q’s current owner, Rajiv Kothari, told me that his dad, Shailendra, opened the three-story Park Street restaurant in the early 1960s. But it didn’t originally serve Chinese food.
“It started with the ground floor, which was a bar,” he said. “Then, we expanded to the first floor, and we specialized in Chinese food then. [Later], we added another restaurant called Tandoor, which was Indian, and we joined that to Bar-B-Q.”
Tandoor—the name for a special clay oven used mainly in western and northern India—serves North Indian food. Think all kinds of naan, tandoori chicken, mutton rogan josh, fluffy white rice pulao, keema, and kebabs. All patrons are seated in the massive main section of Bar-B-Q that even has a balcony above for more seating.
The way to spot the patrons who chose tandoori food or Indo-Chinese is to look at their plates. Tandoor aficionados don’t have the Chinese zodiac placemats beneath glistening white dishes. Instead, waiters immediately top those plates with the customary North Indian accompaniments of green chilies and tiny whole raw onions that are meant to be savored with the food.
But Chinese food is still the crowd favorite. Kothari said that Calcuttans clamored for Chinese food from Bar-B-Q almost as soon as it opened in the 1960s.
“Chinese food in India also originated in Calcutta through Chinatown here,” he said. “Initially, the chef [at Bar-B-Q] was from China. Now, we have Chef Lee and we have other Chinese cooks too.”
Similar to most young locals, Kothari grew up with the restaurant. He began helping his dad with staffing and administrative work in the 1990s as a college student. He’d rush over to Bar-B-Q after his morning classes at the neighboring St. Xavier’s College ended. By the early 2000s, Kothari took over ownership. Now, he oversees a staff of more than 200 who serve an average of 400 people at a time—allegedly the largest restaurant cover in Calcutta.
Regarding the restaurant’s curious name, Kothari has some clues. “Bar-B-Q” may be a pun on the restaurant’s original establishment as a bar, but the new owner thinks his late dad was inspired by something else too.
“I think when he started the restaurant he had a big grill, which he used to serve continental food,” Kothari said with a laugh. “So probably, that’s why the name’s Bar-B-Q.”
Calcutta has changed a lot in the four years I was away. Most of my close friends have left the city, the metro lines have grown, and a bevy of unfamiliar restaurants have cropped up. But Bar-B-Q remained the same. I was comforted by the complimentary cheese puffs, which are always placed on the table to snack on, and by the random assortment of red and orange balloons hanging from the banisters that the waiters gifted to my brother, me, and countless others when we were kids.
For the first time in my life, I didn’t bump into anyone I knew at the restaurant in this new Calcutta. But it didn’t matter, my belly and heart were full on the drive back home. I can’t wait to return.
New Times Staff Writer Bulbul Rajagopal, from the Sun’s sister paper, promises to visit her first home and Bar-B-Q more often. Send red balloons to brajagopal@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Jun 15-25, 2023.