BengaliCafe.com
Title
Royal Bengal: The Finest Indian and Bengali Cuisine, Boston's First&Only Bengali Restauant
Description
AT ROYAL INDIA, a homegrown restaurant opened early this year and already discovered by MIT students, every sauce is different, the food is made with extraordinary care, and the sense of seasoning is most unusual. Gita and Sadhan Mazumdar’s cooking is unbelievably good. The couple are Bengali and cook their specialties, along with other Northern Indian dishes. Chicken soup soars above every other soup like it. This version is pale golden, made with roasted chicken bones and browned besan flour, which makes tiny dark specks in the broth. Eaten with smoky roti, the whole-wheat bread baked in the charcoal-fueled tandoor oven it is a divine combination.
Sadhan Mazumdar cooked at the Bombay Club in Harvard Square for 11 years, and this bit of a place, with just 32 seats, is his first. His beautiful wife, Gita, also cooks and often takes a moment to greet customers. The Mazumdar's seem to have a following already. “Everybody who comes brings more people back,” Sadhan tells me. “They say they’ve never had this food.” One of the Bengal specialties is begun pora, eggplant roasted in the tandoor oven, then mashed with mustard oil, chili, and cilantro. The waiter tried to talk us out of ordering this as an appetizer and though we knew perfectly well that it’s a main course, we ate it as a kind of Indian baba ghanouj, using plain naan, the puffybread also baked in the tandoor, to dip into the slightly hot, mildly smoked pureed eggplant. Heaven!
Aloo bhate, a dish of potatoes mashed with the same seasonings as the eggplant— mustard oil, onions, and green chilies—was smooth and warm. The heat in these dishes can be toned down or cranked up, the waiter tells us, but everything seemed just right. Shorshe fish, a mustardy dish made with the prized Bengal fish, hilsa, had the firm quality of a swordfish, except this species has hairpin bones. It was a little like eating a preparation of shad in which the bones did not melt: wonderful flavor but too difficult to munch. Kasha mangsho, large morsels of goat in a dark sauce, a favorite dish in North Calcutta, offered succulent meat. So did murgir jhol, small chicken pieces on the bone shimmered in a thin spicy sauce. Sadhan makes most dishes as the orders come into the kitchen. You can taste that care all over the menu. ~The Boston Globe
