This restaurant inside a five-star Kolkata hotel has a new menu

Nothing brings us more joy than bingeing on good food, and Vikram Jaiswal, the executive chef at Novotel Kolkata-Hotel & Residences left us happy yet again with his well-curated new menu at Cafe Joy.

“This time, we have curated the menu around the theme of tradition and elegance. We have dishes from contemporary world cuisines, like a burrata salad, along with the classic dishes from Bengal and other parts of India. Earlier, the menu didn’t cover so many cuisines. You can now take a bite from the Kolkata specials like dahi phuchka or pakodas, and rolls, along with French delicacies like roast chicken or cannelloni. I would say, dishes like bhut jolokia chicken wings, sourdough sandwiches, and Amritsari calamari are very unique to Cafe Joy,” says Vikram.

Putting a stop to our hunger pangs with a portion of the restaurant's special burrata salad was a great decision. The melt-in-mouth burrata cheese, with the sweet caramelised walnuts and tarty compressed beetroot and melon, complemented each other well. Cubes of fresh beetroot and melon are vacuum-packed with orange juice here, with a few cinnamon sticks, salt, and sugar to balance the taste and a few sprigs of thyme and rosemary and kept for freezing overnight.

We tasted dahi phuchka next, with a shot of chilled tamarind-mint water, that would easily give any roadside phuchka vendor, a tough competition. We loved how crispy yet juicy the signature bhut jolokia chicken wings tasted. The succulent chicken wings, coated with a spice mix, include a portion of ghost peppers straight from the hills, served with a side of cool ranch. It’s not overly spicy, yet it has a nicely fragrant chilli taste.

If you are a fan of the smoky Amritsari fish tikka, you are going to love this tasty twist in which tender calamari rings are delicately rubbed with spices and lightly coated and deep fried to create this gem of a dish called Amritsari calamari fritters. If you love your wine, this would be a perfect match.

For the mains, we settled on a peri peri chicken, green chilli, and coriander pizza, served straight from the oven. The pizza bread with a soft centre and a fluffy outer crust gets a thumbs up from us. It was cheesy with a good portion of peri peri chicken and it tasted oh-so good.

We ended our lip-smacking gustatory train with a rosemary dark chocolate tian. A layered chocolate cake, with a super chocolaty and dense chocolate ganache had cold-pressed virgin olive oil for that extra creaminess with rosemary and sea salt to balance the flavours.

Meal for two: INR 1,500 onwards