Coffee shops in the 4-5 star hotels
If you want to eat out late night in Calcutta you will have to go the 24 hour coffee shops in the upscale hotels, something like a diner in the US. We stopped at the Park Hotel and this is my favorite place, as you get a fun environment inside here. You can see the place packed with couples coordinating their trysts. They have a bar that plays rock with alcohol touch, disco, authentic Chinese restaurant, poolside entertainment and more. The disco serves cold beer with the hot Indian party mix, definitely an interesting combo. During the festival days (Durga Puja) we were out till the early hours and we decided to stop by the Park Hotel. Their coffee shop staff were real nice and friendly, we just tried some samplers as it was like 3:30AM in the morning. I feel if we had tested their wider range it would have been better. I again tried the roti and dal, Sangita tried the fish fingers (with thick chili dipping sauce).


On the last few days of the festival we decided to explore the displays in another part of town, so for a late night snack we went to the Sonar Bangla hotel. This is a very upscale place, their buffet was open till like 2AM. We wanted some light veggies dishes, but without paneer, they did not have anything, then we decided to have what was in their menu. Here is where miscommunication commonly sets in. When you ask for the items right of the menu the waiters handle your requests well, the minute you want something custom they are confused. So we were like waiting for an hour and no food comes to our table, finally we find out that the waiter was under the impression that we did not want to eat anything. Somehow we were happy about it as the prices were exorbitant. We did drink tea and some aerated drinks.


Indoor smoking is a no-no in the US and rightfully so, India has been trying to curb secondary smoke inhalation, but the enforcement is lacking. Every restaurant we went to we found a few smokers, and we just tried to sit in a ventilated part of the room to minimize exposure.


Corner side upscale Snack shop
In Calcutta there is a satellite township called Salt Lake. Since the city proper was bursting to its seams (2nd most dense city in the world), the planners tried to move people to the suburbs, thus came Salt Lake City with street islands and circles without stoplights (like in Europe). For the most part this has been a success with an Indian twist. Salt Lake is a bit cleaner than Calcutta proper and some of the roadside restaurants are nicer.

Our local faculty friend who was a visitor to Monterey met us here and we entered this place with thumping Indian electronic music. The menu covered the 3 most popular styles (local choices) of cuisines, namely Indian-Chinese, Bengali and North /South Indian. The food was tasty and the pricing average.