If you have feasted on hot, succulent double-egg kathi rolls wrapped around chunky pieces of mutton or chicken instead of home-packed cold jam sandwiches and boiled eggs at Eden Gardens, Kolkata, chances are that you managed to scoot across to Nizam’s, near New Market (24, Hogg Street, New Market) to pick up a few rolls, just as the batsmen pulled off their gloves and play broke for lunch.

Nizam’s rolls and cricket matches at Eden Gardens enjoy a long and deep relationship.

Back in the early 1950s, during an exciting Test match between the MCC and India, a group of enterprising young men hopped across the Maidan — the lungs of Kolkata (Calcutta those days) — crossed over to Chowringhee Road, and dived into the narrow and deep-set bylanes around New Market, to pick up sizzling hot kathi rolls from a then-hole-in-the-wall shop called Nizam’s.

The walls were black with soot and grime, collected over the years from wood and charcoal fire, and greasy from the fumes hissing out of fiery hot tawas and iron seekhs. The young men galloped back to the stadium with the warm newspaper-wrapped kathi rolls where other friends eagerly reached out. As they unwrapped the newspaper, the aroma wafted through the stands, turning heads and inviting a volley of queries about the source of this unique snack.

Deep-fried inspirations

One of those young men happened to be my father — a fresh graduate from Scottish Church College — taking a break from dreary balance sheets at his chartered accountancy classes and articleship.

The now 86-year-old remembers with obvious pleasure that it was his older siblings and friends who first discovered Nizam’s, at a time when the average Calcutta Bengali was still unaware or wary of eating out at these cheap eateries.

Nizam’s sold kebabs and rotis or parathas, and the ‘sahibs’ of colonial Calcutta often drove up for a late-night kebab-paratha meal. Eventually, the shop devised a way to package the meat into the paratha and wrap it up neatly in newspaper so that the sahibs wouldn’t have to soil their fingers. And thus the ‘Nizam’s roll’ was born.

Apart from occasional labour unrest followed by shut-downs, the forerunner of the Kolkata kathi rolls had a relatively steady career till recently, when there was a fire scare. A neighbouring shop went up in flames dangerously close to the walls of Nizam’s. Social media erupted in panic as someone reported that Nizam’s was gutted. “Oh no! Had the loveliest mutton rolls just recently!” wrote Maria Bhattacharya of Indian Oil Corporation on WhatsApp, while Dr Saswati Das exclaimed, “Oh dear! Can’t believe this! One of our childhood joints gone up in flames.” They were both vastly relieved to learn that Nizam’s was in fact unharmed.

“Nizam’s would invariably be our dinner destination after a night show. Thereafter, we’d walk back to the hostel. The police ticked us off so many times because of all the noise we made,” Dr Das laughs, as she recalls her student days at the Calcutta Medical College in the 1980s.

A hangout for many

Night birds flock to Nizam’s to savour its chicken, mutton, egg, aloo and beef kathi rolls, besides juicy kebabs and other Mughlai dishes, not available at home. My father remembers dropping in at Nizam’s for beef rolls well past midnight, and sitting on the benches outside munching on crisp hot rolls, with some of the prettiest and best crooners of the Park Street pubs and restaurants of the 1950s and 1960s.

Devarati Mukherjee remembers being there for late-night snacks even as a kid in the 1960s. “In winter, it was a given that on late nights we would end up at Nizam’s,” she says.

Medical Officer at IOC, Haldia, Dr Sutapa Pal’s memories of night duty at Calcutta Medical College and Nizam’s are forever married. “We’d walk to Nizam’s for a good hot meal. We were always hungry those days. Seems like another age.”

In this weekly column, we take a peek at some of the country’s most iconic restaurants.

sourcce: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Life & Style> Food / by Mohua Mitra / November 30th, 2017