Big Bongg Theory 3.7

Bengali cuisine for me is what is home and what I have grown up with and maybe what I believe in. In growing up with this food – a lightly sautéed gourd, or a fried flower or a small fish thrown in pungent mustard oil - it never was a cuisine. It was just food that sometimes was delectable, sometimes the everyday and sometimes outright boring, especially as a child! But in retrospect, having been trained in professional Japanese cooking and tasting foods from all over the world, I realized I always had a palatefor those particular tastes and smells. I did often think about that food and how my aunt or my mother was better at cooking this or that particular dish. It was then that I started cooking and making Bengali food for myself and friends. I realized how the water needs to be boiled for almost exactly those few minutes that gave me my perfect cup of tea. The oil in the pan needed to look a shade a brown before I put the fish in, for that perfect frying sound. I realize how the size of a fish would distinctly determine the texture of that fish curry. In my head it was all a theory – in an ironic yet tantalizing way, a theory about how there was a reason for everything to taste the way it did. Big Bongg theory is a muddled confusion of all those tastes, smell and sound of cooking. Eat with not your taste buds but with all your senses, as it can never be anything else but that.

Big Bong Theory is my way of re-discovering food that I love. While it may be personal I would like to invite all of you to join me on this little culinary tour for tastes that I yearn for and oh so love. At BBT, none of what I serve is maybe a “cuisine” for what is worth the appellation.But in serving and cooking for you, I believe I am indulging in a cuisine, a very specialized one at that. I wouldn’t want to call it Bengali cuisine. I wouldn’t want to, like most Bengalis, appropriate what is best in the world as having originated in the grand land of Bengal, but the oil and the fish and the mustard and the tea is always tasty! Please do join to taste it and hopefully enjoy it the way you would like to.

- Chef Anumitra Ghosh-Dastidar