Dacres Lane Food Crawl, Kolkata, 2023 - a Local Guides Meetup by West Bengal Local Guides (WBLG)
(December 16, 2023)
(Note: Click to watch the exclusive reel recap here)
The West Bengal Local Guides community is a regional Google Local Guides contributors community based on
the east Indian state of West Bengal, which holds membership of a wide array of Local Guides from different places, different livelihoods, different ages, different backgrounds, different experiences, different professions and different Local Guiding levels who work together to contribute data on the Google Maps for locations in this part of the world. This community was established long back in the year 2015, and since then, it has been organizing numerous meetups and Local Guiding events in the state, in form of photo walks, Geo-walks, food crawls, accessibility walks, heritage walks, festival walks, local business support, inter-country meets, map editing walks, Connect challenges, support and discussion sessions.
After the COVID-19 pandemic curbed the number of physical Local Guides meetups organized by this community, West Bengal Local Guides returned to the norm through hosting the India-Bangladesh Friendship Meetup, Park Street, Kolkata 2023 in July 2023 as we welcomed the head of the Bangladesh Local Guides community, Mahabub Hasan (@MahabubMunna) da during his trip to India. That meetup helped the community members to get inspired, to indulge into the Local Guiding activities with a new enthusiasm in the coming days, as we aim to return to pre-pandemic normalcy regarding hosting meetups regularly. That is how the path was curved out for the Dacres Lane Food Crawl, Kolkata, 2023 - a Local Guides Meetup by West Bengal Local Guides (WBLG).
Kolkata (formerly, Calcutta), the former capital of British India, and today, the capital city of the state of West Bengal, is renowned for being a hub of variety of street foods consisting of culinary delight across the many corners of this city. From rich egg kathi rolls to tasty Aloo Mutton Biryani, from crunchy fish fries to delicious Mishti Doi, from authentic Chinese dishes to refreshing British breakfasts - Kolkata provides one with the perfect mixture of flavors to savor one’s taste-buds. Dacres Lane, located in the heart of the old business district (Office Para) in central Kolkata, close to Esplanade crossing to the east, and Governor’s House (Raj Bhavan) to the west, is one of such heritage street food centers in the city, where countless office-goers have their lunch and refreshments everyday at a very low and reasonable pocket pinch. The narrow lane that connects Esplanade Row East with the Waterloo Street, which although has been renamed as James Hickey Sarani in Bengali language, it is still popularly known as its earlier name of Dacres Lane, which was named after Philip Milner Dacres, who was the former collector of the British East India Company in Kolkata. The history of this place goes back to almost 200 years, when Mr. Dacres used to meet and have a meal together with sailors who gathered at this point for great food, while on a stop from sailing on the nearby Ganga river. Since then, the tradition has continued, though the shops have changed over time in terms of appearance, ownership and cuisines served.
As announced here, the event began at 12 noon sharp on Saturday, 16 December 2023, as the Local Guides gathered in front of the KC Das Sweet Shop at the Esplanade crossing, which was the designated initial assembly point of the event. We had with us the presence of Guiding Star and Accessibility Champion @PritishB (Pritish Biswas) who is also one of the co-moderators of the West Bengal Local Guides community. We had senior Local Guide @TPattanaik (Truptilal Pattanaik) da present at this event, who is a renowned Local Guide in the India Local Guides and West Bengal Local Guides communities. Also, we had the presence of the senior-most Local Guide of the community, @ratanrateria (Ratan Rateria) ji, who ushered us with his lifelong experience. It was really a privilege for me to have such a varied pool of Local Guiding resources from West Bengal at the same place, and to host them at this food crawl event!
After the brief introduction session, the Local Guides started walking towards the actual venue of the event, which was a few meters away from the assembly point. As we reached the entrance of the Dacres Lane, we took a few photos to kick-start the event.
It was therefore time to enter the heritage lane, and explore the eateries at this location, in the middle of the regular hustle that this place goes on a daily basis on the working days. The Local Guides captured photographs, talked to the shopkeepers to know the details about the establishments, edited the operating hours of the shops in Google Maps as they walked through the lane filled with eateries on its left and right, serving a variety of food items to few hundreds of customers here simultaneously.
After the Local Guides had a full run through the busy lane, it was time to get in a Google Meet call to initiate our virtual meetup session. We had renowned Local Guiding Star and India Local Guides senior local guide @TravellerG from Tamil Nadu joining the session with his auspicious presence, along with senior Local Guide @AjitThite ji from Pune, as we showcased our venue for the day at Kolkata on video conference.
The local guides therefore decided to take a break and have a light lunch at one of the eateries at the venue. We decided that Chittoda’s restaurant would be the perfect choice for the lunch, as one of the heritage and most famous restaurants at this area, operating for 70 years at this place. There was a wait time for 15 minutes due to afternoon rush, so we continued exploring around, to search for more jewels at the place.
Finally, our turn came, as a restaurant attendant called us to take seats. The Chitto Da’s Suruchee restaurant is a busy eatery but the employees were keen to keep the premises clean and presentable to its customers. The service was very fast as we ordered as array of dishes to satisfy our hunger.
The food was served pretty quick, hot and well garnished. Here’s a list of food items we explored at this place:-
To our surprise, even after having such a variety of rich vegetarian and non-vegetarian mix of dishes, it costed just ₹200 per head. The food was delicious, and had no compromise in taste or quality. Local Guides present at the venue selected the Fish Diamond Fry as the best among all the non-veg dishes that included Chilli Chicken and Chicken Fried Rice too. @PritishB , who is a strict vegetarian, also had to face no problems as he savored a plate of veg fried rice with a dish of mixed vegetables, along with Paneer Cutlet.
We desired some tea thereafter to warm ourselves up on the winter afternoon, hence we walked a few steps to visit the Faltu Tea Center. The branding of this shop is really interesting, given that the world faltu in Bengali means ‘useless’ literally. However, they served some hot tea on clay pots, that tasted really fantastic and refreshing. We all had a second serving of the tea to get our bodies warmed up.
After the tea break, it was time to have some sweets, as it is a Bengali tradition to end a full course meal with a sweet dish. To complete that ritual, we had a plate of pedas from one the shops at the venue.
With this, our food crawl at the place reached its stage of completion, as we covered almost each and every eatery with our Local Guiding objectives. So, it was time for some parting photographs.
In this way, the event was finally concluded after spending some wonderful hours with fellow Local Guides whose presence and enthusiasm on an end-of-the-year holiday morning made this event really special. I must thank Pritish, Truptilal da and Ratan da for joining us is this event. We would definitely love to have larger number of footfalls in our upcoming events. See you all again with another Local Guides meetup under the banner of West Bengal Local Guides (WBLG) community soon!
