5 Best Restaurants in Kolkata (Calcutta), India

This well-liked restaurant is known for its traditional and contemporary Bengali cuisine. Try the prawns or the hilsa (a local fish), wrapped in banana leaves and steamed in a mustard and coconut marinade. The buffet here is one of the best you can get in the city—it's a great introduction to Bengali dishes.

In a residential neighborhood to the south, this restaurant takes the best and most unique ingredients and flavors of Bengali cuisine, and gives them a contemporary twist. Crab cakes come with mustard sauce and are baked with local greens in small clay saucers, river prawns are simmered in a coconut gravy with grapes, and desserts are delicately flavored with gondhoraj, a close cousin of the kaffir lime used in Thai dishes.

Started in 2002, this is one of the most successful chains for traditional Bengali cuisine in upscale settings. All-time favorite dishes here include river prawns cooked in coconut milk and served in tender coconut shells.

This restaurant serving North Indian and Bengali dishes is a tasteful replica of a rural house, complete with a courtyard, a well, dark wood details, copper curios, and metal light fixtures. The traditional Bengali kebabs are wildly popular.