One straight line south, down the spine of the old city: Bowbazar, then the office district, then the Esplanade, then Sudder Street, then Park Street. Five rooms and about two and a half kilometres, and the whole thing is walkable if the weather allows and a short cab if it does not. A chota peg is a small measure. Nobody here has ever taken it seriously.
- 1 · The Cold Open
Broadway Bar
Iqbal Singh came from what is now Pakistan and opened the Broadway Hotel here in 1937, and the bar on its ground floor has barely been touched since. High ceilings, slow fans on long stems, plain wooden chairs and marble-topped tables, and light coming through French windows onto a floor that has been mopped a hundred thousand times. Nobody is performing heritage at you. It is simply a room that was built well and never redecorated, full of men reading newspapers over a beer at four in the afternoon.
est. 1937, and never redecorated · day till late · verified Aug 2026
- 2 · The Detour
Amber
Two brothers, Rajpal and Sudesh Khullar, opened a small coffee house at the Shyambazar five point crossing in 1950. In 1954 they took on a boarding house of sixteen rooms here on Waterloo Street, and in 1959 they bought the old bar directly across the road from it and turned that into this. So the restaurant exists because the men running the lodging house opposite decided to own the room their own guests were already drinking in, which is a very Calcutta way to go into business. Tandoori and Mughlai, in the middle of the office district, and it has been doing both for sixty-seven years.
est. 1959, by the boarding house opposite · lunch into the evening · verified Aug 2026
- 3 · The Anchor
Chhota Bristol, Shaw Brothers
Down Metro Gully off the Esplanade crossing, behind a door that tells you nothing. Shaw Bros have run it for something close to a hundred and fifty years, which makes it the oldest bar in the city and reliably the cheapest. You pay first, in cash, at the counter, and the bottle comes to your table. The list is on an LED board and they expect you to already know what you want. From six until a quarter past, every single day, service simply stops while the puja is done at the counter, and the whole room waits. This is the anchor because nothing else on this road is as unbothered about being liked. Be aware it is overwhelmingly a men's room and has been for a century.
roughly 150 years, and the cheapest · afternoon till late, cash · pin is the lane, not the door
- 4 · The Wildcard
Elgin Fairlawn
William Ford built the house in 1783. Rosie Sarkies, an Armenian, bought it from two Englishwomen in 1936, and her daughter Violet Smith ran it from 1962 until she died in 2014, aged ninety-four and still coming down to greet people in the garden. The green paint, the photographs, the wicker in the courtyard: it was one of the last genuinely unreconstructed traveller's hotels in Asia. Elgin bought it in 2018 and restored it properly, so what you drink in now is handsome and no longer hers. Take a beer in the garden anyway. It is still the quietest square of ground on this walk.
house 1783, hotel since 1936 · afternoon into the evening · verified Aug 2026
- 5 · The Last Call
Trincas
It began as a Swiss tea room and confectionery run by a Mr Trinca, and it only became what it is when the liquor licence came through in 1961. After that Park Street became the loudest street in India for about fifteen years and this room was the centre of it. Usha Uthup sang here as a teenager in a Kanjeevaram sari when nobody thought a woman in a sari sang that kind of music, and she was still filling it decades later. Bands play nightly and nobody has ever suggested they stop. Last one here, and bed is on the same street.
tea room from the 1930s, licensed 1961 · till late, music nightly · verified Aug 2026 · 🏨 the night ends at The Park, Park Street
bands play nightly and nobody has ever suggested they stop
🎁 What we left off, and why. Park Street holds Olypub, Peter Cat and Someplace Else within about three hundred and fifty metres of Trincas, and three of them plus Trincas would have been four of five stops on one street. Olypub is the one that hurt to leave: it opened in 1947 as the Olympia Bar and Restaurant, took the shorter name in 1981, and has been serving beer and chelo kebab to people who do not care what year it is ever since. It is a hundred metres from your last stop. Go, obviously. It is just not a separate chapter.