This furniture cafe in Kolkata should be your next hot-spot

How often do you come across a diner that is not just well decorated with fancy pieces of furniture, but also sells them? Calcutta Art Cafe, located at Ruby Park, has all things handmade and repurposed on display for sale, along with freshly made bakery items, sandwiches, pizzas to gorge on, and coffee.

A brainchild of aerospace engineer-turned-restaurateur Prithvish Chakravarti and Cee Bee Design Studio’s Chitralekha Biswas, who refurbishes artsy pieces and preloved furniture, everything about the space garners your attention with its elegance. The vintage pieces, freshly varnished and placed against the chequered floor and bricked walls, paired with the aroma of freshly brewed coffee and wafts of buttery puffs and cakes, transport you to a picture postcard scenery.

We took a tour of this two-storeyed place before coming back to a table full of puffs like koraishutir kochuri (peas kochuri) puff, raw jackfruit jalousie puff, mutton puff patties, fish puff patties, and baked mutton samosa. The peas puff, as eccentric as it might sound, was a reimagined version of the koraishutir kochuri, with familiar stuffing. And if not pointed out, it’s difficult to identify that the raw jackfruit puff has a stuffing of spiced fibres of jackfruit. You could easily mistake it for a non-vegetarian puff.

We had a chicken sandwich next, made with in-house marbled bread and a stuffing of poached chicken, dijon mustard, kasundi, pepper and mayonnaise. What made it more interesting was the way it was toasted, which was only on the inside, making it crispy, not soggy.

The ciabatta prosciutto sandwich, prepared with a cheesy-tasting prosciutto sourced from Italy, cherry tomatoes, bocconcini (procured locally from Bakreswar), and lettuce, was a great option with freshly brewed coffee. The best part of having sandwiches here is that you can choose your bread from various options, including sourdough, baguette, focaccia, ciabatta, and marbled bread.

Trying their Pepperoni overload neapolitan pizza was perhaps the best decision ever! The pizza, made from scratch, and topped with stretchy, gooey mozzarella, was soft, and cheesy, with smoky pepperoni. This heavy meal surely called for a glass of refreshing lemon iced tea in the end.

Meal for two: INR 500 onwards. At Ruby Park.

Pictures by Anindya Saha