Bengali Peeps, You'll Love This Restaurant's Festival Dedicated To Bhapa & Pora Dishes

Friends, Romans and Bengali Countrymen, Indiranagar restaurant Esplanade is doing a festival dedicated to all kinds of bhapa {steamed} and pora {roasted} dishes cooked in a rustic Bengali style. And we have even spotted some hard-to-find dishes at this festival.

Bengali cuisine offers a range of low oil, but high in flavour steamed dishes as well. In fact, fish is steamed in the bhapa method commonly, often with a light mustard sauce. And as for the pora method, Bengali cuisine also does a bunch of wonderful dishes where meat, fish or vegetables are parcelled in a banana, lotus, pumpkin or gourd {this one’s the tastiest} leaves and then roasted or charred on a clay oven. Both methods can be easily done at home as well, as your mum is going to inform you.

Esplanade is bringing this festival of steamed and charred dishes whole of this week. We swung by this weekend gone by, for lunch, at their recently revamped restaurant, and here’s what we thought. We started off with an interesting Galda Chingri Shalmi or tiger prawns stuffed with minced and spicy bhetki fish and then breaded and deep fried to give it a cutlet-like structure. The portions were quiet generous and can be easily shared by three people. Moving on to mains, we first tried a mulo, narkel aar dal pora , a radish, coconut and dal cake parcelled in a banana leaf and steamed. The dal parcels came with a bite of radish and a hint of coconut and were delicious to eat. But we found the cakes {for the lack of a better word} a bit too large and unwieldy. Smaller parcels would have been easier to deal with. A note of caution: most dishes on this festival are dry, so you might want to order yourself a curry or dal to go with the rice.

We tried two kinds of fish from the non vegetarian section. A Bhetki Shim Beguner Pora, chunks of bhetki cooked with brinjal and runner beans, and Chalkumro Pataye Ilish Narkel Pora, hilsa marinated in a mustard coconut paste and then parcelled in ash gourd leaves and roasted. While the bhetki tasted really fresh with the added flavours of the vegetables and green chillies, relatively no masalas, the ilish was a clear winner. It was so good we ordered one more. The leaf had taken on the flavours of the fish and mustard and was charred just right. Yes, you can eat this leaf because it is so delicious. The fish itself was rather good quality.

We ended our meal with the excellent Natun Gurer Pora Sandesh, a sweet flavoured with loads of  smokey nolen gur {palm jaggery} and then parcelled in a banana leaf and charred. This resulted in the surface of the sandesh getting caramelised much like a creme brulee.

You can also try the Kankra Chingri Palanger Bhapa {crab and prawns steamed with spinach}, Chingri Narkel Pora {prawns and coconut roast}, Pomfret Longka Achar Bhapa {pomfret steamed in pickled chillies}, and even a chicken dish called Bhapa Murgi, steamed in lotus leaves.

When: On till November 26

Price: INR 225 per dish + GST