Chourangi

Chourangi is a district in Calcutta (Kolkata these days), and the restaurant name reflects the Kolkata cuisine that is featured here. Choruangi is actually part of an Indian restaurant group with 130 restaurants and 19 brands, concentrated mainly in Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata. The London branch is near Marble Arch and opened in late 2021. London has had the occasional restaurant highlighting this cuisine, such as Calcutta Street, but the cuisine of the city is less well known in the UK than that of, say, Goa or Kerala or the Punjab. There are influences from its Chinese and European populations, and the dishes from the city major on seafood and vegetarian offerings, as well as it being noted for its biryani. I haven’t been to the city for some years but it was once the capital of British imperial India (from 1772 to 1911) and has over 15 million people living in it, almost quadrupling since 1950, and is now the capital of West Bengal. The history of its developing cuisine can be read about in this book. The menu here is a mix of dishes from he region, such as the fish hilsa (flat herring) and more familiar Indian dishes.

Back to Chourangi in London, the restaurant is located in a small pedestrianised street just off Oxford Street, near Marble Arch. The ground floor dining room seats up to 75 people at any one time, with some additional outside seating in good weather. Tables are quite small and quite closely spaced, and there was background music that was a little louder than it needed to be given all the hard surfaces. The head chef was Subir Deb, who was from Calcutta originally. As well as the a la carte menu, there was a tasting menu at £59 and a weekday lunch menu at £19.

The wine list had 39 labels and ranged in price from £36 to £220, with a median price of £66 and an average markup to retail price of an absurd 4.65 times. This is currently the most expensive wine list in London in my database of 279 lists that I have analysed. Sample references were Free Run Steen Chenin Blanc 2022 at £48 for a bottle that you can find in the high street for £10, Planeta La Segreta Il Rosso 2022 at £64 compared to its retail price of £11, and Ascheri Gavi di Gavi 2022 at £80 for a wine that will set you back £16 in the high street. For those with the means, there was Bertani Amarone 2019 at £160 compared to its retail price of £36, and Jean Michel Gaunoux Meursault 2020 at £190 for a wine whose current market value is £79. A half pint of Cobra was £4.50, or £9 a pint. 

Popadoms came with a little metal dish of mint chutney as the only accompaniment. The popadoms were crisp but the chutney was minuscule in quantity, just a thin layer at the bottom of the dish. Another chutney dish was provided without any issue but this seemed a little odd. Mint chutney is not exactly a luxury ingredient like caviar, so why be stingy with it?

I started with two tandoori Welsh lamb chops (£20.50), with a marinade of mustard, yoghurt and spices, served with a little more of the mint chutney and a pickled onion. The chops had reasonable flavour and had absorbed the spices nicely but were overcooked, grey inside rather than pink. The pickled accompaniment was a good idea to cut through the richness of the meat, but lamb should always be pink rather than grey (11/20).

Better was a fried sea bass dish labelled “Calcutta fish fry” (£20.50), notionally flavoured with lime juice and green chilli, which came with a kasundi mustard dip. The latter is a staple of Bengali cuisine, made from mustard seeds, green chillies, water and salt, and is quite spicy. The fish itself was cooked competently, though the lime and chilli seemed missing in action, so it tasted essentially like a piece of fried fish that you might get at a chip shop, other than the mustard dip. Nonetheless, the sea bass itself tasted fine, and the dip was lively enough to make up for any lack of chilli with the fish (13/20).

Chicken biryani (£29) arrived with no pastry case covering. The rice was quite fragrant, flavoured with saffron, vetiver (a bunchgrass with an earthy scent in its roots that is vaguely reminiscent of lemongrass) and sun-dried rose petals. The chicken was not dried out as is easy to do with this dish, there also being potatoes and a hard-boiled egg in the rice along with the meat. Calcutta versions of biryani differ from the better-known Hyderabad one by being a little milder and including potatoes, which are not present in Hyderabad biryanis. This version had no pastry case to seal the cooking pot, which you certainly expect to see in some Hyderabad biryanis. Overall this was a pleasant enough biryani, if not up there with the very best that I have tried, both here and in India (13/20).

Grand Trunk Black dhal (£14) is exotically named after a famous trade route linking Asia to India, but it tasted just like black dhal to me, with urad lentils cooked overnight with butter and cream. It was fine, the lentils being tender and buttery, though the spice mix was a little less intense than in some versions (13/20). Makhni paneer (£21.50) had a sauce based on tomato and with creamed cashew nuts. The sauce reminded me of a butter chicken sauce, and the paneer (Indian cottage cheese) itself was still firm but not chewy (13/20).

Hing aloor dum (£15) featured pieces of potato cooked with tomatoes and flavoured with asafoetida and cumin. The texture of the potatoes was excellent, and the cumin flavour came through well. For me, this was the dish of the meal (14/20). Naan bread (£5.50) had a reasonably good texture, being quite soft and flavoured with nigella seeds (13/20).

Saffron and pistachio kulfi (£8) was made in the kitchen from scratch, flavoured with roasted almonds and made with frozen reduced milk. The kulfi had good texture and you could taste the saffron without it overwhelming the dish (13/20). Coffee was from an Italian company called Torrefazione Portioli east of Milan, but the coffee was roasted dark and tasted like an industrial rather than speciality coffee. It was not the worst, but it would be so easy to find a better roaster than this. Despite presumably being made to order, it arrived warm rather than hot.

Service was pleasant though a little distracted at times, and getting the attention of waiters was an erratic business. The restaurant was quite busy though not full, but the service could not be described as slick. If you go to somewhere like The Brilliant in Southall you will see that it is possible to run a very efficient and attentive service operation in a restaurant that is at a much lower price point than Chourangi. The bill came to £106 per person with beer and a cocktail to drink, with a service charge of 7.5%. Portions were generous other than the mysteriously carefully portioned mint chutney, and you could have ordered a dish less and still had plenty of food. Nonetheless, it is likely that you would end up with a bill of around £80 a head or so. This seemed to me quite a lot of money for what appeared. Admittedly you are near Marble Arch, but if you compare this to a restaurant like Haandi in the hardly cheap area of Knightsbridge, the price still seems high. £21.50 for a paneer curry is a lot, and if you add in a wine list with a higher markup to retail price than at Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester (which is quite an achievement in a way) then this is no bargain. Nonetheless, it was doing a steady business on this Sunday evening in March, so presumably it has found an audience.