At Two Kolkata Cafes, It’s the ‘Adda’ That Matters
Plotting revolution and spinning gossip at crowded tables.
KOLKATA, India — At one of the cafes, to ask for chai is to invite a gaze of withering contempt from the turbaned waiter, as if blasphemy has been committed: It’s called the Indian Coffee House, stupid.
At the other cafe, only chai is served, slow-cooked over a coal fire in the same dark kitchen for 103 years with the silent care of performing an old ritual. The history of this place, the Favorite Cabin, is visible in the soot covering the walls, in the arched windows that filter the light in a soft aura of a bygone time, in the little attic overhead that is an open burial vault for all the chairs broken under some storied customer who got carried away during a passionate debate.
The two cafes, just a five-minute walk apart in central Kolkata, might be distinct in which caffeinated drink they offer. But they are bound by their shared role in fueling a century of political argument, revolutionary plotting and endless gossip in a city at the heart of India’s rich intellectual tradition.
Both are in the College Street area, the bustling neighborhood that is home to some of Asia’s oldest universities. The alleys are jammed with small bookstores, the city’s enormous appetite for knowledge production spilling onto the pavement.
Kolkata wears its past on its sleeve like few other cities, from its rotund yellow taxis to its antiquated trams. The two cafes are at once museums to nostalgia, and part of an indispensable, even addictive, daily routine for many.
“I arrange the times of operations in a way that I can make it here,” said Dr. Jayanta Ray, 70, a gynecologist and dedicated Coffee House customer.
Zahid Hussain, the manager, has worked at the cafe for more than three decades. “I have done the A to Z here — everything from serving to cooking,” Mr. Hussain said. “Except for sweeping.”
When the cafe closed during India’s Covid waves, customers like
Dr. Ray, who has frequented it for 40 years, itched to get back in. “His wife kept him under house arrest,” a friend joked, “until he got his second vaccine.”
On most days, customers at both cafes come just to talk for hours about everything and nothing. There is a word in Bengali for that unrestricted conversation: “adda.”
“Adda is something that goes unnoticed — because it’s so part of our every day and it’s so integral to the identity of being a Bengali,” said Dr. Nabamita Das, a professor of sociology at Presidency University in Kolkata. “And when you think about adda you think about adda integrally tied to the space of adda — you talk about the Coffee House adda, the Favorite Cabin adda.”
Some of Bengal’s favorite icons would hold adda at the Coffee House, from the filmmaker Satyajit Ray to Amartya Sen, who won the Nobel in economic science. Intellectual giants have spoken fondly of how the coffee and conversation shaped their worldview.
Balcony seating offers a little privacy for intimate conversations, and a view of the scene below.
“I sometimes sat upstairs and could feel the conversations rise,” wrote Partha Ghose, a physicist and author.
One day at the Favorite Cabin, customers pushed their way in even before Sanchay Barua had opened the doors to the cafe, started by his grandfather. Kanchan Das, a worker, was boiling the milk over a coal fire in the back — the way he has for 51 years.
Dr. Ray said he had tried the newer, fancier coffee shops that have opened around Kolkata. Did he like their coffee?
“No! No! No!” he exclaimed.