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Amber/Essence
The reliable Indian and Continental food is the same on different floors but the slightly pricier 2nd floor dining room has the nicer décor, being upmarket yet relaxed, with trendy grey-and-orange backlit panelling.
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Aminia
This bright but old-fashioned budget eatery has high ceilings and more under-employed staff than there are menu items. Curries are tasty if greasy. Tandoori chicken costs just 25 per quarter.
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Baan Thai
Many restaurants serve pseudo-Thai food but for the real thing splurge at the world-class Baan Thai, located in the swish Oberoi Grand hotel.
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Bar-B-Q
This enduring family favourite offers truly delicious Indian and Chinese food in separate nearby sections. Genteel head-waiters are sharp-witted but obliging and décor is comfortably unpretentious.
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Barista
Starbucks-style chain Barista is a reliably youthful place to linger in air-conditioned comfort. Coffees are decent and it has numerous alternative branches around town.
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Camellia Tea Bar
Camellia Tea Bar does multifarious teas served cocktail-style on a pleasant roof-garden. Try spicy Thai-chai or curious Irish Tea with an ice-cream float.
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Chennai Kitchen
Remarkably good South Indian food served in a stylishly retro-modernist diner style atmosphere with glass waterfall, designer steel servingware and glass tables inlaid with spice designs.
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Dolly's Tea Shop
If shopping at Dakshinapan don't miss this characterful teahouse offering 24 different infusions and as many iced flavours. Regal matriarch Dolly is a tea writer-researcher whose magnetic presence attracts a wonderfully eclectic clientele.
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Drive Inn
Plate-lickingly good Indian vegetarian food served in a modest open air 'garden' with simple fan-pavilion tables. Do yourself a favour and order the stuffed capsicum.
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Fire & Ice
Modern Italian restaurant offering real pastas and pricey fresh ground Italian coffee. Red designer ducting runs along high ceilings while self-consciously handsome wait-staff sport black shirts, white aprons and bandanas.
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Flury's
This wonderfully enticing Art-Deco palace-café serves unusual, semi-sweet Belgian Mocha coffee and offers all-day breakfasts but sandwiches and croissants aren't always fresh.
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Indian Coffee House
Once a meeting place of freedom fighters, bohemians and revolutionaries, this legendary place has crusty high ceilings, archaic fans and grimy walls ringing with deafening student conversation. It's perversely fascinating despite bland chow meins and dishwater coffee.
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Ivory
Fashionably suave Indian, Chinese and Continental dining with some of the most original curries in town, originally dreamt up by India's leading celebrity chef. Excellent lunch buffets from Rs400 .
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Jalapenos
Jalapenos does reasonble approximations of Mexican food along with some pseudo Lebanese and Italian offerings in a pleasant if unremarkable interior.
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Kathleen Confectioners
Appealing stand-and-eat chain bakery serving delicious savoury pastries and sickly-sweet cake slices. There are many other branches, including one on AJC Bose Rd.
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Kewpies
Dining at Kewpies is almost like being invited to a dinner party in the chef's eclectic, gently old-fashioned home. First-rate Bengali food comes in small but fairly priced portions (minimum charge Rs200 per person). Find it down the tiny alley beside Netaji Bhawan.
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Mainland China
World-class Chinese food in gently sophisticated surroundings. Superb lobster-lemongrass soup, acceptable dim-sum and unusually drinkable Indian wines, notably the Sula Sauvignon Blanc. Reservations advised, enter behind Barista Coffee.
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Mocambo
Although somewhat old-fashioned, reliable kebabs and European dishes like creamy Chicken Tetrazini ensure a very loyal following for this old stager.
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Nizams
Bengal's trademark fast-food is the kati roll . No, that's nothing like a bread-roll. Take a paratha-roti, fry it with a one-sided coating of egg then fill with sliced onions, chilli and your choice of stuffing - typically curried chicken, grilled meat or paneer (unfermented cheese). Roll it up in a twist of paper and it's ready to eat. The classic, recently relaunched, 1932 roll house is Nizams, with faintly Tin-Tin-esque cartoon décor.
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Oh! Calcutta
High class Bengali, Mughlai and Continental cuisine in a suave pseudo-colonial atmosphere that's a delightfully calm contrast to the brash modernity of the surrounding mall.
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On Track
An almost full-sized steam train heads straight for the window offering parents a unique, upmarket dining experience in leather-seated Pullman carriages while the kids play in the locomotive. Over-keen waiters flock like vultures but food standards vary.
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Only Parathas
Calm and relatively stylish this new restaurant offers high quality Punjabi vegetarian food including (but not limited to) 133 types of paratha (bread).
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Peter Cat
Opposite KFC, this phenomenally popular Kolkata institution offers top quality Indian cuisine, fizzing sizzlers, great chelo-kebabs and beers quaffed from pewter tankards. Waiters wear Rajasthani costumes in an atmosphere redolent of a mood-lit 1970s steakhouse.
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Rupasi Bangla
Cane, glass and wrought-iron furniture create a low-key but gently stylish ambiance in which to savour a great range of genuine Bengali cuisine. Friendly management can help you decipher unfamiliar menu terms.
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Teej
Above a good sweet shop and Dominos pizzeria, this wonderfully atmospheric place has been superbly painted with Mughlai-style designs to look like a Rajasthani haveli (merchant's house). The excellent, 100% vegetarian food is predominantly Rajasthani too. Superb Paneer Sartaj.
