Even in a metropolis where tradition and food combine to cook an aromatic broth, where seekers comb barely navigable warrens for an authentic ladleful, 12, Ganesh Chandra Avenue is unlikely to ring a bell. Tucked away in a timeworn corner off Central Avenue, one of Calcutta’s busiest thoroughfares, where history makes a defiant stand on either side of its long stretch from Esplanade to Girish Park, our family restaurant, Eau Chew, has been part of the City of Joy’s heritage.
This is Eau Chew’s 100th year. It is Calcutta’s oldest family-run Chinese eatery, one that hasn’t succumbed to cheesy commercialisation or kitschy publicity. For most people, Calcutta’s famed Chinese eateries mean those on Park Street or China Town in Topsia or Tangra in the east. But which Chinese restaurant can claim to have a son cooking the pork and stewing the chicken, the mother preparing the sauces and noodles and the wife doubling up as a cashier-cum-waiter?
Eau Chew, or ‘Europe’ in Chinese, goes well with the old cosmopolitanism of Calcutta, polished to perfection like an heirloom made of teak. It is part of central Calcutta’s heritage, much like two of the city’s oldest theatre houses, Mahajati Sadan and Star. With two media houses—Anandabazar Patrika and The Statesman, Calcutta Medical College, Calcutta University and heritage offices like CESC at Victoria House and engineering firm M.N. Dastoor on Mission Row in its vicinity, Eau Chew has had an emotional connect with passing generations.
Food is all about trust and promise. Which Calcutta street doesn’t have a ‘Chinese’ restaurant? We never wanted to compete in terms of volume of revenue or scale up by opening branches in multiplexes. Ever since our grandfather, born in Calcutta, set up Eau Chew in 1919, it has remained a joint family business. We are the fourth generation running it and doing fairly well, despite the pandemic restricting dine-in opportunities. Calcutta is where the Huang family’s heart and soul is. My mother’s dad had opened a branch in Bandra, Mumbai, but closed it about 35 years ago. Many family-members migrated to Canada, but my father clung on to Eau Chew. After he died in 2010, me and mum have run this place and kept in touch with our patrons, many of them in their 60s and 70s. The fact that we have managed to survive, when old Chinese eateries like Nanking, Song Hay or Chung-Wah have either shut down or changed hands, is testimony to the unchanging quality of our food. Our dishes are more ‘Chinese’ (Cantonese) because we don’t use ajinomoto (monosodium glutamate) and the sauces, especially the soya sauce, is home made.
While the smoky chimney soup (above), meat ball soup and pork chilly are our famous dishes, a noodle named after my mother, Josephine, has been our signature dish for decades. So what’s special about Josephine noodles? The story goes like this: One day, a ravenously hungry Bengali customer, Dipu Roy Chowdhury, walks in during lunchtime. He asks my mother, who is a terrific cook, to make something special and stuff it with everything ‘non-veg’. So mum mixes a portion of vegetables, mushroom, chicken, prawn, fish and pork with pan-fried noodles and produces a heavenly dish. It’s duly christened ‘Josephine Noodles’—a staple in every food review.
Our clientele has mostly been Bengalis. The older generation continue to order takeaways. Crafting food keeps the family going and despite the option to buy Vietnamese Basa instead of Calcutta Bhetki, we have not compromised with quality. The meat and fish continue to come from ‘Hogg Market’ or New Market, while standard sauces are best got from Poddar Court, an area that saw the first Chinese families and eateries. But we have a problem. No, the ‘Boycott China’ campaign has not worried us one bit. Our association with Calcutta is over 100 years old and a city that has grown calluses through its long cohabitation with diversity will never let politics sour old ties. We are getting increasingly worried about land sharks. Ours is a rented house. The restaurant is on the first floor and us four live on the fourth. For the last 70 years, we have paid a rent of Rs 400 a month. The landlords want us out now. We are fighting a case in court. There are no proper documents; the clerk who first registered our family name in Calcutta spelt ‘Huang’ as ‘Young’. Nobody really cared, but times have changed. Our clients have been our biggest support. We are more Calcuttan than Chinese and what’s cooking for lunch at home is not chimney soup or noodles, but the simple and tasty daal and bhaat (yellow pulses and rice)!
—As told to Soumitra Bose