Weekends in Whitehall, small batches of Bengali take-away

The doorbell rang. Arpita Chakraborty’s husband, Chris, stepped into the kitchen. “There are three people outside,” he said.

Chakraborty hurried over to the hob and spooned saffron rice and slow-cooked chicken into two take-away boxes.

She lowered each box into one of the brown paper bags, labelled with names, on her kitchen table.

It was Saturday afternoon and Chakraborty’s second weekend in operation as Picachilli, a pop-up Bengali food take-away, which she runs out of her home in Whitehall.

“I’m not a professional and I’m not sure yet if the profit margin is enough to do this regularly,” she says.

She likes to keep it small and personal, she says. The menu has three dishes: a pulao rice, roasted cauliflower with cashew paste, and chicken kosha, with the prices ranging from €11 to €15.

And, she doesn’t do deliveries, it’s all pick-ups. “I’ve mostly been sending this out to friends, but it’s a phenomenal response so far,” she says.

She gets through 20 servings of each dish per week, she says. “I think by nature, I can’t do more than that, and I don’t want to commercialise this too much.”

Her hope is more to give people yet to encounter it a taste of Bengali cooking, she says. “Or, if there is someone from Bengal who is really missing food, they can come, and I’ll cook.”

A meal for friends

Chakraborty takes a break in between orders. She sits at her table and adds a couple of pieces of chicken onto a plate of mishti pulao rice.

The yellow saffron-infused rice is sweet and fragrant, mixed with cashew nuts and raisins and turmeric.

The chicken is tender and coated in a juicy sauce with cloves, cardamom and coriander.

It’s a mild curry, save for one full green finger chilli in the mix. “It’s like an episode of Hot Ones,” she says, looking at the chilli.

All of the dishes are Bengali, she says. “The chicken, for example, would’ve been something my mother cooked every Sunday.”

Chakraborty is from West Bengal, in eastern India. The state’s cuisine differs from what is often understood as Indian cuisine here in Ireland – Indian cuisine being something of a meaningless term, she says.

“What you get in the name of Indian food here is from a very specific part of India. That’s the northern part,” she says.

Places like Delhi where the food is far spicier, she says. “Our dishes, because it’s near the sea and mellow, are much mellower. Not spicy. A lot of seafood and lentils.”

Really, what inspired Chakraborty to set up Picachilli was a desire to cook that food for herself and friends, she says. “Over the years, my friends came over at the weekend, and I would cook for 10 to 12 people.”

It then became a case of opening the door for others to try it too, she says. And the doorbell continued to chime.

Lighter dishes

Chakraborty does most of the cooking on Saturday mornings, she says. “This took me five hours.”

A lot of work goes into it, she says. She makes her own spice mixes.

She brings a round golden box out from one of the cupboards. A wedding gift, she says, opening it to show the black cardamom, mace, fennel seeds, cumin and nutmeg.

Those are the kinds of spices used in a dish like her phulkopir roast, which is itself typically eaten at weddings, she says.

She places a few pieces of roasted cauliflower on a plate and ladles on a creamy white gravy with cashew paste and raisins, and yoghurt. “It’s very sweetish and mild,” she says, “so it’s very far away from the north Indian cauliflower dishes you’d get”.

And, she uses the cauliflower leaves and other leftover vegetables for a fourth side dish, she says. It isn’t yet on the menu, but she was serving it on Saturday too.

She doesn’t want to waste anything, she says. “Like my mother would use potato skin to make a crispy potato peel with poppy seeds.”

A dark green dish, with a smoky flavour, made from potato, cauliflower leaves, radish and eggplant, she says. “That’s it.”

While she is cooking the chicken and phulkopir, she lets it simmer in a pot, she says. “It’s easy to make and there are so many dishes like this, which you will never get in a restaurant.”

A daal is in another small yellow bowl. Lentils, onion, chilli, coriander leaves and tomato. “And those tomatoes will melt,” she says.

It’s a light dish and a late addition to the day’s menu, she says, before the doorbell rings three times and she excuses herself once more.By 2pm, Chakraborty had posted to Picachilli’s Instagram page that they had completely sold out for another day.