The Enduring Charm of Kolkata’s Pice Hotels

Kolkata’s pice hotels have offered home-style food to the city’s migrant workers since the early 1900s. Today, their unchanged menus remain an authentic representation of Bengali food. Yet, are struggling to stay relevant, finds Drishya Maity.

The day begins early for Amarnath Deb. Every morning at six, he heads to the local market, looking for the day’s haul of fresh fish and vegetables. This is later taken to Tarun Niketan, a 108-year-old pice hotel in Kalighat; Amarnath is its the fourth-generation proprietor. There, it is turned into traditional Bengali fish delicacies like chital maach-er peti (fish steaks braised in a thin mustard-oil-based qaliya-style curry) and murri ghonto (a traditional fish head stew, made by cooking halved catla or rohu heads with rice or lentils and seasonal vegetables).  

A mainstay in Kolkata’s culinary landscape, pice hotels get their peculiar name from the word pice — colonial English for paisa — the lowest denomination of British-Indian currency, valued at 1/64th of a rupee at the time. In the early 1900s, when Bengal’s economy was shifting from its agrarian roots to rapid industrialisation, these hotels popped up all over Kolkata (then Calcutta) to cater to the migrant workers and students who came to the city looking for work or education. These young men lived in lodgings known as mess-bari (mess houses), and pice hotels grew out of these mess kitchens as a response to their demand for affordable, home-style food. Initially, mess kitchen meals were simple thali-style fares with only the most essential sides such as daal, curry, sabzi, bhaja, and chutney. As the clientele matured and evolved from workers and students to office-goers who could afford more elaborate meals, so did the menu. New and exciting dishes were added, and certain rules and etiquettes were imposed.

Unlike the western eateries on Park Street and Chowringhee Road that catered to the Europeans and the Bengali elites, pice hotels were run by the working class for the working class, serving affordable, traditional, home-style recipes like aaloo posto (potatoes cooked with poppy seed paste), kumro-phool-er bhaja (pumpkin flower fritters), bhetki paturi (barramundi fillets marinated in mustard sauce and baked in banana leaf), and maach-er bhapa (steamed fish). To keep operating costs low and business profitable, sustainable practices like seasonal eating and nose-to-tail cooking were utilised, long before they were in vogue. Every part of the produce—from the bones to the peel—was used, and everything from the banana leaf for serving rice to the pinch of salt and the slice of lemon for seasoning, was itemised and billed individually. The menu (pictured below), too, was decided daily depending on what was available in the local market that morning.

The Daily Menu at Tarun Niketan

Hotel Sidheswari Ashram's Daily Menu

Times have changed and prices have increased since then, but pice hotels still function the same way to this day.

“We do our best to keep prices low, so working-class people can still afford to eat here,” says Rita Sen, the fourth-generation proprietor of Hotel Sidheshwari Ashram, a pice hotel in the Esplanade area. Rita has been running the place with her sister-in-law Debjani since the death of her father and brother in 2015. Hotel Sidheshwari Ashram is unique among pice hotels in this regard — it is the only women-run pice hotel in Kolkata. “My father used to tell me, ‘see to it that people aren’t turned away because of our prices,’” Sen said. “So that’s something that always stays in the back of my mind. I remember one time, a man from the rural area came to the hotel. It was late in the afternoon and he was hungry. He had a meal of steamed white rice, daal, fish curry, and after his meal, he sought me out and blessed me saying, ‘You are doing god’s work feeding all these visitors. May Maa Annapurna (the Hindu goddess of food and nourishment) bless you always.’ I will never forget that,” she says.

“It hasn’t been easy keeping the hotel afloat,” she confesses. “In fact, my father and I considered shutting down the hotel after my brother’s death, but in the end, I couldn’t do it. 32 people work here and depend on us to make a living,” she said. “I feel responsible for them.” Rita left her job and took over the reins of the family business, supervising the 32-member staff at the hotel who cater to as many as 500 people a day, serving eight kinds of fish, two kinds of meat, three kinds of daal, rice, and several kinds of vegetable soups, stews, curries and gravies — all prepared from family recipes passed over generations.

This is what sets apart pice hotels like Sidheshwari Ashram and Tarun Niketan from newer, flashier restaurants that serve traditional Bengali cuisine — their considered aversion towards change. Every item on a pice hotel’s menu is prepared exactly the same way from when these establishments first opened their doors to visitors almost a hundred years ago. They are, inarguably, the best places to find authentic Bengali food in Kolkata today.

“The food we serve isn’t all that different from what mothers and grandmothers in most Bengali households cook almost every day,” says Rita.

Kochu Shaak, Ilish-er Matha Diye

Mutton Kasha

There are many traditional Bengali dishes on a pice hotel menu—like Tarun Niketan’s kochu shaak, ilish machh-er matha diye, a thick, oily mash prepared by slow-cooking Hilsa head and offal together with chickpeas and tender taro leaves and stems; or Sidheshwari Ashram’s ruhi kabiraji, a light fish curry of rohu steaks cooked with potatoes and plantains — you would be hard-pressed to find them elsewhere.

Kolkata’s legendary pice hotels may very well be running on borrowed time. Changing tastes, increasing costs, and a diminishing clientele are ominous signs that the glory days of pice hotels are behind them. The cost of living crisis means that people are eating out less often, and untamed inflation means that increasing overheads are chipping away at already thin margins. Working with food delivery apps hasn't helped much either. The relocation of many state government offices from Central Kolkata to Salt Lake — a north-eastern suburb of the city — at the turn of the century meant that they could no longer count on the steady patronage of government office workers who used to account for a huge portion of the hotel’s regular clientele. “Our primary clientele these days consists of tourists, local workers who simply prefer our food, and people who come to Kolkata from the districts for a day or two on business or work,” she told me.

What does the future hold?  “I try not to think about that,” says Rita. “My daughter is interested and says she wants to continue, but only time will tell.”

Drishya Maity is a writer + artist based in Kolkata, India. He was shortlisted for the Mogford Prize for Food & Drink Writing and nominated for the BBA Photography Prize - One Shot Award in 2022. He is @drishyadotxyz on Instagram and Twitter.

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