Streetwise Kolkata: How Dacres Lane has historically been linked with the city’s business of food

At first glance, it might not be easy to spot the entrance to Dacres Lane: with colonial buildings on either side, the pavements have been taken over and covered by hawkers selling clothes, sunglasses and stationery. A handful of eateries have come up on these pavements over the years as well, making it seem almost as though Dacres Lane, full to the brim with streetside eateries, has spilled out onto Esplanade.

Several foods that were first served at these cabin restaurants, and later became a part of the city’s street food, were a combination of Indian, Anglo-Indian, Mughlai and European cuisines adapted for the local palate. (Express photo by Shashi Ghosh)

Regular customers from the city’s office-worker community will have their own lists of preferred lunch spots in this approximately 150-metre-long street, but ask anyone for recommendations, and one name will commonly pop up: Chitto da’s dokan.

There is a good reason for that. Over the 60-odd years that this shop has been in existence, Chitto da’s shop has created its own identity and place among people searching for the city’s iconic foods with a long list of eateries to tick off.

By the 1940s in Calcutta, Bengalis began opening eateries that sold cheap meals, affordable plates of rice and dal, teas, coffee and quick bites like toast, targeting students and others on low budgets. (Express photo by Shashi Ghosh)

Several of the street side shops in and around Dacres Lane sell steaming hot plates of ghugni (chickpeas curry) with thick slabs of butter toast — buttered bread slices toasted over a coal fire. Bengali lunch staples like khichuri and telebhaja (a selection of fried vegetables), chicken stew, mutton stew, fish fry and fish fingers in the style iconic of the Apanjan shop in Kalighat, mutton kabiraji, Indo-Chinese dishes etc. are found in several shops in this lane, and a lunch meal would rarely cost above Rs 100. But regulars swear by food cooked by Chitto da’s dokan, so much so that for many, the shop has become almost synonymous with Dacres Lane itself.

The fries, stews and other lunch staples are also dishes commonly seen in the city’s cabin restaurants and streetside food stalls and are also provided by catering services during Bengali weddings. In her book Culinary Culture in Colonial India, author Utsa Ray writes that these public eateries—the cabin restaurants and the street side food stalls—the first of their kind in the Indian subcontinent, allowed the common man to discover the “pleasures of eating out”.

Several of the street side shops in and around Dacres Lane sell steaming hot plates of ghugni (chickpeas curry) with thick slabs of butter toast — buttered bread slices toasted over a coal fire. (Express photo by Shashi Ghosh)

By the 1940s in Calcutta, Bengalis began opening eateries that sold cheap meals, affordable plates of rice and dal, teas, coffee and quick bites like toast, targeting students and others on low budgets. Several foods that were first served at these cabin restaurants, and later became a part of the city’s street food, were a combination of Indian, Anglo-Indian, Mughlai and European cuisines adapted for the local palate.

Various adaptations of these meals and cuisines are what comprise the most popular foods of Dacres Lane. These meals that developed as cheap, affordable meals for the city’s working class and students have largely remained the same; the only change is that their prices have increased over the decades.

The fries, stews and other lunch staples are also dishes commonly seen in the city’s cabin restaurants and streetside food stalls and are also provided by catering services during Bengali weddings. (Express photo by Shashi Ghosh)

But throughout its history, Dacres Lane has always been intrinsically linked with the business of eating and drinking. In pre-Independence Calcutta, it served as a place where sailors who docked in the city’s ports used to gather and dine.

In his book A History of Calcutta’s Streets, P Thankappan Nair writes that Dacres Lane was named after Philip Milner Dacres, an Englishman who arrived in Calcutta in 1756, where he was posted as the Assistant Import Warehouse-Keeper. Between 1773-1774, he served as the Collector of Calcutta.

Throughout its history, Dacres Lane has always been intrinsically linked with the business of eating and drinking. (Express photo by Shashi Ghosh)

Just before Dacres returned to England, he sold a house and an attached ground, a little over 24 cottahs (a measure of land), to a fellow Englishman by the name of Henry Scott. One of the old colonial buildings that presently stand on either side of Dacres Lane may be the former home after whom the street is named. Nair writes that a “public lane” ran along one side of the house when Dacres still owned it, and it is likely that what is now known as Dacres Lane is the same street that was once adjoined to a part of Dacres’ property.

Nair writes about the presence of Moore’s Assembly Rooms, which was the location of several important events in the early part of the 19th century, including a farewell banquet for Gilbert Elliot-Murray-Kynynmound, the 1st Earl of Minto, who served as the former Viceroy and Governor General of India.

In February 1982, the road renaming advisory committee of the Calcutta Municipal Corporation recommended renaming Dacres Lane as James Hickey Sarani, a move that was sanctioned in April of that year, and was done to mark the bicentenary of the date when the Indian subcontinent’s first English-language newspaper, Hickey’s Bengal Gazette, was published.

If the lunchtime crowds make it impossible to navigate all the way to Chitto da’s Suruchee restaurant which offers a table, chairs and a menu board, with Chitto da’s specials below Rs 100, the stall a stone’s throw from the restaurant itself might be more accessible for a quick bite. Otherwise, the stalls selling lassi and fruit juice in large beer mugs at the entrance to Dacres Lane might be what visitors have to settle for.