In a nutshell:

A Bengali cuisine restaurant with disgusting staff whose facial expressions suggest they r doing u a favour, South Indian Udipi Restaurant kind of interiors, a super long menu card of which I guess 60% items r not available & they serve some average to good food.

Address & other details: Padmaparer Rannaghar is located on the same footpath as Gariahat Bata. Walk towards Golpark & this restaurant is on ur right.

Meal for 2: Rs. 200 onwards

Cuisine type: Vegetarian & non vegetarian

Background:

Bengali food is usually associated with fish, meats & everything non vegetarian. However there r some extraordinary vegetarian food items made from leaves, stems, flowers, roots etc that cost minimal but taste YUMM e.g. Mocha (banana flower), thor (the pith of the banana stem), oal (root), bok Phool (flower), kumro Phool (pumpkin flower), kochu pata (leaf), kochu (root), lau shak (leaf) etc. These have unique tastes & flavours and most of these r different from the mainstream usually available Indian vegetarian food.

Short Description – In case u r in a hurry:

The Restaurant has come up in a place that housed a South Indian Udipi restaurant. So we saw people still coming in & asking for dosas & idlis. The Restaurant Management has decided to keep some of South Indian items in addition to a long list of Bengali items in the menu.

The menu card is very very interesting. It has a super long list of traditional Bengali food items. Infact, I came to know of this restaurant from facebook – someone found it interesting & had uploaded it & I shared it. However what was disturbing was 60% of items in the list were not available. I understand that all ingredients are not available on all days – Good restaurants do a ‘curry of the day’, ‘starter of the day’ etc for such items instead of giving hope to the customer & then saying ‘we do not have this’.

Waiters were dressed in Panjabi pajama – traditional Bengali dress. Even the younger guys were strange in behaviour. Forget a warmth in dealing with guests, they were not just cold – they were freezing cold. Either they r paid low / simultaneously had fights at home before they came to office or someone forced them to come to work on a day when they were expecting a holiday. In case the Owners r reading this post, they must act on it – send in friends / relatives posing as normal customers & let them experience it.

Smile is something they r not used to & the behaviour was as disgusting as it cud get or even more than that. In fact trade unionized waiters of erstwhile government run eateries were better than these chaps.

I am sure I will not revisit unless I am dying to have tasty bengali food specifically in Gariahat.

At 1.10 pm, the restaurant had 2 tables filled – first it felt strange. Later I guessed the reason.

Food was good in general – some were great, some average & some aweful.

Detailed Description – In case u have the time to njoy Reading:

We started our meal with Kochu bata (paste of Kochu root, a vegetarian dish) – it had its share of pungency, awesome taste & flavour. It was a bit ‘sour’ish which is unusual but tasted very good. I wud give this 4.5/5.

Musur daaler bora came next – It turned out to be 4 tiny pakoras made from masoor daal. It is best had immediately after it is fried. However the one served to us was not freshly made. So it was Good to taste but not wow. I cud imagine that these cud have tasted better if freshly made.

Chhanar dalna was excellent in terms of both taste & flavour. The good flavour of gawa (cowmilk) ghee was making its presence felt. Chhana (Bengali version of paneer) was super soft, tasty, nice & much better than usual paneer. The gravy was better than any malai paneer kinda dish that u get in abundance in northern part of India. I wud give this a 4.5/5.

Mochar ghonto (banana fower) was spicy, quite rustic, a bit oily but very enjoyable. Though a bit mellowed down wud have been good, I really enjoyed this one. I wud give this a 4/5.

Chitol maacher peti turned out to b a disaster – The fish was not fresh & to hide this, they had hard fried the fish. As a result the ‘butteriness’ of the peti was gone & hence it was absolutely not appreciated. The Gravy was tomatoee & pretty average. It was strange why they messed up on this so badly when they did a great job with the vegetarian food. 2.5/5.

Last dish was DakBungalow mutton. As the name suggests, this is a Raj era dish. The Mutton pieces were outstanding – amazing taste & flavour. So was the gravy. Onions gave a bit of sweetness to the gravy. I wud give this a 4.25/5.

For dessert we ordered Pineapple chutney. This was a catastrophe. It seemed that rusk of rasgulla from nearby sweet shop was used to sweeten the chutney. The chutney had no character of its own, no taste / flavour of pineapple, thickness of gravy suboptimal, no pinch of salt, no sour taste. In terms of all flavour, taste & texture it was horrible to the extent that I cud just bear to have 2 spoons in a situation where I can polish off katoras of chutney if they r good. I wud give this a 0.5/5.

Overall score for food in this place adds up to 3.4/5. I went there with real high hopes but the experience did not turn out that way. Pls share ur experience if u have been here.