Chourangi, Anjan Chatterjee’s London restaurant backed by Aditya Ghosh will be turning three this year (on October 7). Sourcespoke to Chatterjee and Ghosh about their venture, how it all began and are there further partnerships in the future.

It was during the launch of one of Chatterjee’s restaurants in Mumbai in 2018-19 that Ghosh and he got into a conversation about how Bengali and Calcutta cuisine didn’t have a proper platform to showcase itself, Ghosh remembered.

“”I think Anjan (Chatterjee) has single-handedly done more for the cuisine through Oh! Calcutta than anyone else. So the conversation carried on and Anjan had the same idea and I said, we should open up a restaurant in London,” Ghosh said.

It was Ghosh’s push and seriousness about the project that propelled it forward, he remembered. “This whole last five years journey has been me riding on the coattails of Anjan because he’s just such a fabulous executor and leader,” he said.

“Anjan was very clear that it (the restaurant) can be Instagrammable later, but in itself it should be very authentic food,” he said, adding, “We wanted it to look like a beautiful fine dining restaurant which is serving food from Calcutta, not just Indian food, but food from Calcutta.”

Chatterjee even did a tasting for Ghosh and others, taking over a London hotel’s kitchen and restaurant to serve up the ultimate Kolkata banquet in the summer of 2019. The passion that went into the project meant that Chatterjee even took the designer to Kolkata to visit everything from the streets to the clubs of the city.

Chatterjee, who had been going to London regularly since his children were studying in the UK said he would visit high-end restaurants serving Indian food and felt that it was time to showcase the cuisine of Bengal and more specifically Kolkata.

Regional Indian cuisine was already making headway in the city, Chatterjee said thanks to his friend and chef Sriram Aylur at Quilon. He just wanted to push the agenda forward with food from Kolkata—bringing in the famous Gondhoraj lemon with him to serve up at the meal in 2019. It was that meal which clinched the deal of getting them their location in Marylebone as well.

Inside the 2900 square feet Chourangi designed by Steve LaBouchardiere and Simon McCarthy’s hospitality design studio, Design LSM.

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“I strongly believe, that if you have the four Ps of marketing—product, price, place and promotion— the product itself has to be relevant and authentic,” Chatterjee said, adding, “there was no supply of authentic regional food (in that area), except South Indian food in Quilon. So we found the opportunity, and I was dead sure it would work.”

The other main reason that they have been able to sustain the restaurant was the deep pool of experience among those working in Speciality Restaurants back in India, he stressed.

“We had the best of manpower—so, we just picked the best of the chefs of Oh! Calcutta—people who have worked with us for 14-15 years,” he added.

“For a market like London, which is kind of the food capital of the world, with so many Indian restaurants, there was no Calcutta or Bengali food restaurant, virtually none,” Ghosh said speaking of the success of Chourangi.

“The first starts with being able to see that in this there is an opportunity. The second is to not go the usual route—try something experimental and if it works, continue on the path, else cut your losses. We took the opposite path and said no, if you’re going to do something, it has to be in a great location. It has to have a very good ambulance. The food has to be authentic. And the ingredients have to be really top notch,” he added.

About future projects, Ghosh started by saying they had just begun and Chourangi was only three years old. However, there are a few spots around the world which have great Indian diaspora and provide the same need gap opportunity.

Chatterjee said there were plenty of queries coming in with requests for franchises or more restaurants not only in the UK but US as well as other parts of the world.

“We’ve not entertained them at this point of time, because we continue to believe that we want to take this to a level where we have stabilised both monetarily as well as brand standards wise. At the right time, we will definitely do one more, in maybe another part of the UK,” Chatterjee said.