Tasting menu at Sienna Store, Kolkata… originality, brilliance, perfection!

May 27, 2023

Tasting menu at Sienna Store, Kolkata… originality, brilliance, perfection!

Let me say this upfront. My tasting menu at Sienna Store was one of the best meals I’ve ever had in the country.

Bhaja, Bata & Hola

But I don’t know if my frame of reference for chef Auroni Mookerjee and Sienna is an accurate one because a weekend tasting menu is not necessarily representative of the weekday cafe menu. I can only react to what I ate.

And what I ate was so audacious in terms of thought and execution that it was one of those meals that force you to change the way you look at an entire cuisine.

In 2018 I remember writing that Prateek Sadhu couldn’t be compared to previous schools of Indian cooking because (like the Spanish chefs of the early 21st century and the Nordic chefs a half decade later), he had invented an entirely new way of looking at Kashmiri (and Indian) food. Where he took inspiration from his roots in a more composite manner. The history, culture, terroir, produce, topography all informed his creative process and he found a way to take all of those influences and translate them into dishes that no one had ever seen before.

That is what Auroni has done to Bengali food in the meal I ate. He has taken inspiration from maati (earth) and bajaar (market) to create Bengali food that no one has ever thought of and imagined before. He has done this in a way that isn’t superficial but is deeply thought through, coherent in vision and cohesive on the plate and palate.

Butter Poached Golda Chingri & Ghilu

I was amazed at the level of knowledge and technique in the meal. The use of classic French techniques in a way that wouldn’t be out of place in any three-Michelin star restaurant in Paris. The ability to go deeper and deeper into the essence of taste and flavour and find a way to capture it, distill it and present it. The quality of the cooking with both meat and seafood. The choice of scampi to create the most intense marrow sauce extracting every bit of juice from head was just one example. And then the cook on the scampi, lightly seared so that it retained its freshness and bite, almost sashimi like, without a hint of the overcooked rubberiness that we usually get.

This respect for produce and product is one of the hallmarks of great cooking. And in this case the confidence extends to cooking with ingredients that restaurants scrupulously avoid. The pond mussels that were served were meatier than anything I have had before with an almost calamari like bite. They were served with the little snails that are eaten by farming communities and found in the ponds and paddy fields and which I had never seen outside of small North Eastern restaurants before. This extended even to the vegetables. Neem leaves for bitterness. The peels of gourd to make crisps. This treatment of protein and greens was assured, skilful and confident to a degree that is exceedingly rare.

But then again, this approach is actually quintessentially Bengali. The Bengali kitchen cooked nose to tail with fish and meat before the phrase became popular, and root to leaf is an essential approach to vegetables across Bengal.

Eat Your Teto Vegetables

That was the most interesting thing about the meal though… how undeniably Bengali it was. It wasn’t Bengali inspired. It wasn’t a take on Bengali food. There was zero appropriation. This was a hardcore Bengali meal in every way. Starting with the bitterness of the neem and rice, a bitterness that was uncompromising and took me back to childhood battles with well meaning elders, this was a quintessential Bengali meal experience. Most of the courses were classic dishes from a Bengali home, dishes cooked every single day based on what was available in the bajaar that morning. The ingredients used for the cooking were regular Bengali market purchases (just one dish used Gondhoraj, instead choosing to use regular Limbu). There were four different rice varietals across courses, none of which were fancy or mass produced or packaged.

Deem Bhaat

The dish that really epitomised the Bengali-ness of the meal was the Deem Bhaat. One of the great comfort foods of every Bengali home is a simple mash of eggs, rice and potatoes with salt and either mustard oil or butter. The version at Sienna had scrambled duck eggs with potato chips made of Badami potatoes, on a bed of buttered rice and a crab caramel. This dish was a trip… a trip down nostalgia and memory, but also a trip into an acid fuelled version of memory that is hard to produce in a rational mind, a dish where I closed my eyes to savour every bite, a dish that was singular and new but as old as your earliest memories of childhood.

Escargot from the Pukur

But Auroni is also insistent on proving that Bengali food is more than middle-class nostalgia, so he also served us a dish from the paddy fields of rural Bengal. A dish of rice with snails, pond mussels, clovers and Asian pennywort sauce… a meal that in essence was one you could eat in a farmers home, but in a form that felt like I was eating at Narisawa in Tokyo and called (with more than a hint of bourgeoisie irony) “Escargot from the Pukur (pond)”.

To have had a meal like this with a master chef who has decades of experience would have been rare. But to eat it with someone who has been a chef for 6 years, who was writing advertising copy as a creative director for Leo Burnett six years ago… that feels inexplicable and unimaginable. I genuinely don’t know how it’s possible and I find it crazy that the two best meals I’ve had this year (this and with Vanika Choudhary at Noon) have both been cooked by self-taught chefs. I wonder if it is because they are free of baggage and their eyes aren’t blinkered by years of theory and fidelity to classrooms. Whatever the reason, this was a meal that is a lodestar to all young chefs in the country. Be brave. Be fearless. But put every drop of sweat and blood and heart and soul into your cooking. Think deeply. Ask questions. Seek answers. Because if you do it, and you do it again, day after day, and year after year.. someday, like Auroni Mookerjee, you will cook a meal that is more than brilliant. You will find perfection.

The meal: