Location: Kolkata

Author: My Husband

The Taj is an excellent hotel, and most of the restaurants in the property were correspondingly excellent. Sonargaon, the Indian restaurant, was where my colleagues and I ended up having dinner most often.

The décor is quite elaborate, with the designer trying to create the look and feel of a rural house.

The photos below show one of our dinners there. The waiters actually divvied up the portions onto our plates, which we found novel at first. But then, it became quite impractical as each of us ended up being over/under served. On subsequent visits, we told the waiters to just leave the food on the table.

Instead of the trio of chutneys typically served in Vancouver Indian restaurants, Sonargaon provides a plate of pickled pearl onions, onion slivers, as well as cucumber and carrot sticks. For the more adventurous, there were also two super hot chilli peppers.

Papadams were nicely crispy and spicy, though my colleague M thought they were a little too spicy.

Raan Sonargaon. This is a tandoor roasted leg of lamb finished in a curry sauce, and is a northern Indian dish. The meat was tender, and the curry a little milder than the Kosha Mangsho (below). This is consistent with what I have been told: that northern Indian dishes tend to be less spicy compared to their southern counterparts.

Kosha Mangsho, or Bengali Mutton Curry. A rich, spicy dish, with the gaminess of the mutton slightly masked by the curry. Despite the heat, the other layers of flavours came through. I had to wash this one down with plenty of Kingfisher…

Daal made using black lentils. This was easily the best daal I’ve eaten, with a luxurious, creamy texture. The maitre’d mentioned that a lot of cream was used in its preparation.

Rumali roti. This was a very thin, very delicate bread (folded up like a handkerchief) that went very well with the curries. Just slightly thicker than a crepe, this bread tasted surprisingly doughy.

I did not capture any photos of our other meals at Sonargaon. Not surprisingly, I’ve never had better Indian food anywhere else. In fact, Sonargaon has raised the bar for Butter Chicken (Murgh Makhani) so high, I’m thinking of giving up on ordering it in Vancouver restaurants. The Butter chicken was an off-menu item that we ordered on 3 occassions, but the chef did such a masterful job that one would have thought it was a best-seller in the restaurant. The flavourful and moist tandoori chicken (thigh pieces) served as the perfect vehicle for transporting the wonderfully rich and creamy sauce into our stomachs. To make a good Butter Chicken, using good tandoori chicken is quite essential! The chef came out to chat with us the third time we ordered it, but he was probably secretly thinking we had a very one-dimensional view of Indian food.

Despite Sonargaon being the Taj Bengal’s flagship restaurant, the service was strangely hit and miss. One evening, we ordered three mango kulfis for dessert, which they had run out of at a previous dinner. The waiter went off and came back with three servings, mumbled something about “…chef saying this is good for you…” and set them on the table. It wasn’t mango kulfi. We asked the waiter to repeat what he said, and he replied, “The chef said caramel kulfi is better for you, that’s why we’re serving it to you…”. Since we didn’t mind that much (and found it pretty funny actually), we just ate up and chalked one up to experience…