London does not lack for Indian restaurants. You could eat a different curry every night for a month and never run out of choices — the tikka masalas, the garlic naans, the familiar comforts we all have a favourite version of.
But every so often you want a meal that does something more than satisfy. You want to be surprised.
That is what waits at Chourangi. Just off Oxford Circus, on Old Quebec Street, it carries the flavours, stories and 300-year-old food culture of Calcutta into the middle of London — and asks you to taste a side of India you probably haven’t met yet.
What Makes Chourangi One of the Best Indian Restaurants in London?
Indian food has never been just curry and naan. The subcontinent holds dozens of distinct cuisines, each with its own larder, its own techniques, its own idea of what a good meal should feel like. Most of them never make it onto a London menu.
Chourangi is built around one of the most overlooked of them all: the cuisine of Calcutta.
For centuries, Calcutta — now Kolkata — sat where the world came to trade. European, Mughal and Chinese hands all left something in the pot, and over generations those influences folded into Bengali cooking to create a food culture found nowhere else on earth. Chourangi tells that story through its menu.
The result is Indian food that feels familiar and foreign in the same mouthful. You’ll recognise the spices. It’s the combinations — mustard where you expected chilli, coconut where you expected cream, a whisper of Chinese technique in a Bengali dish — that catch you off guard, in the best way.
A Taste of 300 Years of Calcutta
The name says everything. Chourangi comes from Chowringhee, one of the oldest and most storied quarters of Calcutta — and the restaurant was built to carry the spirit of that place across two continents.
It’s the work of chef and restaurateur Anjan Chatterjee, alongside Aditya Ghosh, who set out to share the unexplored flavours of Calcutta with the world. The menu grows straight out of Anjan’s own childhood — the food he remembers from the city that raised him — reimagined with a modern hand but never losing its roots.
Which is why a table at Chourangi is more than a night out. It’s a doorway into a different, quieter, richer side of Indian food — one most people never get to see.
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