A Guide To Kolkata Street Food

Indian street food- delicious, quick and incredibly cheap. Need any more convincing? One of the things I most look forward to when we visit Kolkata (after seeing family of course) is the street food. There's nothing like it. Different parts of India have specialties, and here is your guide to street food in Kolkata, in the East of India. You've probably heard about food poisoning from street food (and true, I did get food poisoning this time), but in general if you follow take these precautions you should be safe.

• Don't ever drink water unless you've seen it's been filtered or is sealed bottled water. If you've seen Slumdog Millionaire you'll see that sometimes they put tap water into bottles and pass it off as mineral water! This applies to food as well- if there is ANY water in your street food, do not eat it
• If the food is on a plate that has just been washed, make sure to wipe any excess water off it so it doesn't contaminate the food
• Only eat food you've seen has just been cooked - if not, you don't know how long it has been sitting out. Perfect territory for pathogens 
• If the stall is busy you know it's good. If there are no locals going to the food stall, generally it means that the quality isn't very good. The best street food stalls have queues of people as soon as the evening hits
• All the other obvious hygiene stuff like sanitising your hands before and after

So after you've done all that, these are some foods you definitely don't want to miss out on...

Dal bora - loosely translates to lentil patty. Think popcorn chicken but made of lentils. Basically little fried bites of heaven.

Chicken rolls - a wrap made of thin naan with fried spicy chicken, vegetables and sauce which is famous in Kolkata. You won't get a roll like this anywhere else in India!

Papdi Chaat - my absolute favourite Indian street food. It looks like a mess I know. It's a mixture of fried crackers, dried noodles, potatoes, sauce, chillies and nuts. Sounds so random, but it's 11/10. There are different variations of chaat- but this is in my opinion is the best.

Sweets - if there's something you have to try when in India, it's got to be Indian sweets. It's kind of a custom to serve sweets when people come to your house, so they're a massive thing in Indian culture. There are probably about a hundred different sweets, so take your pick. Ones that I find particularly good are 'pera' 'barfi' and 'gulab jamun'.

Samosa- samosas in India are completely different to what I'm sure you're used to. In fact they rarely call them samosas in Kolkata, they call them 'singharas'. And you only get vegetable ones. They're good, but to be honest I think I prefer samosas in England. 

Chops - essentially deep fried battered potato with spices and chillies. You also get battered aubergine, prawns and egg chops. Pretty much anything battered tastes good, right?

So there is a quick run through of some of the best street food you'll get in Kolkata- one of the best cities in India for street food. This isn't even half of what is available (Puchka's are up there but didn't quite make the cut), but I think these are the ones you can't miss!