Indian Chinese food is a genuine cuisine with a known birthplace, and that birthplace is Kolkata. Hakka families cooking for Indian customers adapted their food to local ingredients and local palates: more chilli, more garlic, ginger, soy thickened with cornflour, and dishes built to be eaten with rice or noodles rather than as part of a Chinese banquet.
Chilli chicken, Hakka noodles, chow mein with Indian vegetables, and the whole Manchurian family came out of these kitchens. It is now on menus from Delhi to Dubai, and almost nobody eating it knows where it started.
The names
Places, institutions and dishes| Name | Where | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Chilli chicken | Tangra and Territti Bazar | The founding dish of the cuisine; Hakka technique, Indian chilli. |
| Hakka noodles | Tangra | Named for the community that made them. |
| Chimney soup | Tangra | A hotpot cooked at the table; the Tangra speciality. |
| Chow mein | city-wide | Adapted with Indian vegetables; now street food across the country. |
| Eau Chew1927 | Ganesh Chandra Avenue | Josephine noodles, named after a family member; four generations of the Huang family. |
| Beijing Restaurant1980s | Tangra | Among the reference kitchens for this cooking. |
| Kim Ling1980s | Tangra | Long-running Hakka kitchen. |
| Mainland China1994 | founded in Kolkata, now city-wide | Anjan Chatterjee's chain; the polished national version of the same cooking. |
| Chung Wah1930s | Chittaranjan Avenue | An old central Kolkata Chinese room. |
| Prawn wafers and fried fish | Tangra | Tangra specialities rather than menu filler. |
Worth knowing
- This is a real cuisine with a real birthplace, not a corruption of Chinese food.
- Chimney soup is the dish to order that you will not find elsewhere.
- The Manchurian family of dishes was invented in Kolkata and Mumbai between the 1960s and 1975.
- Hakka, not Cantonese, is the tradition behind most of it.
- Eau Chew is the oldest family restaurant and worth going to for that alone.
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