Saturday, December 25, 2010

Chinese Breakfast on the Street

This morning I woke up seriously early, at 5.30am. The motivation was that strong! We were going to try out the breakfast sold on the street at Poddar Court, somewhere beyond Esplanade in Kolkata. I looked on good old Google and found that we had to go to Sun Yat Sen Street. This turned out to be a little beyond Benticnk Street which, I was told, is full of shoe shops.

Well, we found Poddar Court quite easily and looked for the Chinese vendors. There were a bare handful and I saw more luchi torkari (puri and potato sabzi) sellers than the Chinese guys. However, the few that were there made our morning.

The first thing I saw was a tray laden with glistening pink and white fresh pork sausages. I immediately bought some.

Then as I glanced around to see what all was on offer, Dada walked up tome with a plate full of fish momos.

The sausage seller agreed to keep my parcel while I sampled the goodies from the others. The fish momos were quite nice. Not spectacular but nice. 

We wandered over and checked out one seller who seemed to be doing brisk business. We tried the Pork fried momos. He offered us steamed fish momos too but we'd already tried those from someone else. This quite offended the fellow and he very sulkily commented that his were made with 'pure' fish..no onions, and were the real thing. We tried them out to appease him and they were quite nice too though I will admit, they were different. 



The street is quite messy and the stalls are all higgledy piggledy sharing space with a tea stall, vegetable vendors and even flower sellers. One one side was a lady selling soup with rice dumplings. The was even a table where you could stand and enjoy the soup. The table was provided with a caddy of soup spoons, forks, chopsticks and little steel saucers for the garlic sauce.

The soup was lovely! Hot, mild broth with tender green garlic shoots, and two delicious rice dumplings that were flavoured with fish and pork. Just perfect for a nippy morning.

By now we were quite stuffed so we looked around to see what else there was and keep it in mind for next time. There was this one man selling Pork rolls and pork chops. No, not the pork chops you'd imagine but the typical bengali potato covered chops made with pork! A marriage of Chinese and Bengali cuisine, no doubt. He also had these interesting flat large puris studded with decent sized whole prawns. We will try these out next time.




 On the opposite side of the road was a vegetable vendor selling a variety of leafy greens - mustard greens, radish greens, Kolmi shaak, methi leaves, green garlic, bok choy and Chinese lettuce. And there were flower sellers too with a medley of colours making the morning bright and cheerful.




And of course we brought some goodies home..
Here's one. This is the size of the dinner plate and is stuffed with rice. We shall find out just how it is at lunch today.


If you're in Kolkata and are up for an adventurous and delicious breakfast check out Poddar Court very early one morning. Everything's gone by 8am so come in early! You can eat like a king without spending even Rs.100 here.

Oh, and Merry Christmas to you!

2 comments:

Sassy Fork said...

A great find,Rhea!!

Arundhuti said...

Wow, this post reminded me of my college days, when I had been there with friends quite a few times for an early morning breakfast...great post!