While Calgarians have grown accustomed to the plethora of Indian eateries across the city, the team at Thank You Hospitality (the restaurant group behind Native Tongues Taqueria) wanted to introduce a different kind of Indian dining concept to the city. Their plan was to spotlight the street foods and Bengali cuisine of Calcutta in a tropical, colonial-inspired space. So when the time was right and a space came available, Cody Willis, Shovik Sengupta, Amber Anderson, Maya Gohill and chef Rene Bhullar opened their opus Calcutta Cricket Club on July 6, 2017.
The restaurant is a labour of love that stemmed from an ongoing series of foodie discussions amongst Shovik and Amber, and Cody and Maya. The two couples were spending a lot of time together and started to hatch a hypothetical plan to open up their own Indian eatery. “Calcutta Cricket Club kind of started off as an idea that we went back and forth about; something that we thought would be fun and awesome to do,” Cody explains. “After Native Tongues opened, and Native Tongues was going well, we were kind of just talking about how it would be awesome if we did something similar but with Indian food.”
When Bar C shuttered at the end of 2016, Cody and the team at Thank You Hospitality decided it was time to turn that hypothetical Indian restaurant idea into a reality. And they wanted to use both the original Calcutta Cricket & Football Club and Calcutta Club as the restaurant’s inspiration. The Calcutta Cricket and Football Club is one of the oldest clubs in the world, established in 1792 and originally run by the British and at the time exclusive to whites and elites. The Calcutta Club was the first social club of its kind that allowed Indians.
“We love that specific part of the story where it was the first thing to open up for everybody,” Cody explains. “We wanted Calcutta Cricket Club to be a social club, but for everybody. We wanted it to be unpretentious and we wanted to strip away some of that exclusivity that these old social clubs would have had.”
Shovik (whose own family is from Calcutta) became the face of the business while Amber took on the bookkeeping and financials and Maya tasked herself with the restaurant design. Cody took on the operations of the project, bringing Rene Bhullar (formerly of Ox Bar de Tapas) on board as head chef. “Rene is Indian and he’s Punjabi so he’s been very involved with the whole process,” says Cody. “He’s been cooking Italian and Spanish and all these other foods since he started cooking, but he’d never really cooked Indian food in a professional restaurant environment. So he was really excited about going back to his roots and what’s familiar to him.”
