As the glasses clinks against each other, and the voices can be heard from the low tables with covers of maroon or yellow colour, I found myself in a place with the shaded lamps throwing light on black- and-white old Calcutta pictures. The draught beer taps are placed on the table, and I can see the slanting sun-rays blending in through the large glass windows on the front.
Broadway Hotel has been synonymous to Calcutta’s heritage since its inception in 1937. It has one of the oldest dive bars in Kolkata that still retains the vintage ‘art deco’ style, reminding us of the colonial influence that is so intricately woven into the culture of this city. It is this Europeam style old-world charm that have tried to preserve. A stay at thus hotel will give you a taste of Europe because of the architecture and envelop with the colonilal era gone by in Calcutta.
While sitting inside the hotel on Ganesh Chandra Avenue you can hardly miss a tall man gracefully roaming around from table to table, ensuring that everyone gets a seat, he is the owner Sandeep Sehgal, and he is indeed very tall.
Mr Sehgal took over the hotel three years ago with the bar is on the ground floor and the four floors on top have rooms to stay in. He is the one who incorporated the draught beer, AC, new crockery and a new menu that included boiled eggs and the famous “Stock Market Toast”
Sehgal, who is now 50 up, comes from a Punjabi family in this city. He assured “I am not going to change any of this. Because there is going to be no other place like this.”
So what makes this old bar so special apart from the architecture? Think yourself sitting at the table by the large front windows with the moonbeam falling on you and a light jazz being played live, uumm mesmerising, right?
But to be honest it does not matter really. The waiters there do not trouble with excessive attention or neglect either. The menu is exciting, everything is there from a robust Chicken-a-la-Kiev to succulent pieces of deep-fried Katla fish, and at prices that are quite old world too. There you find the old bar standing in a corner.
One of the interesting part here is that the servers here are the people who are there from the time the present guest’s grandparents used to visit. Both the waiters and guests are kind of known to each other for time infinity.
I loved to see how Calcuttas’s rich cosmopolitan culture is preserved through the music and food at Broadway.
Nibble_O_Gram 