India, Aug. 28 -- Chinese food in Kolkata isn't so much a cuisine as a reflex - the sort of thing many Calcuttans learnt to order before we had fully mastered our syllables. Fried rice, chilli chicken, gravy chowmein: these aren't merely dishes but childhood punctuation, appearing after report cards, during cousin sleepovers, on rainy Sundays and whenever nobody at home could face the existential burden of deciding what to cook. The city has been eating Chinese for generations, long enough for Hakka and Cantonese traditions to collide magnificently with green chillies, local sauces and the Bengali appetite for drama.

But here's the thing: you never simply say, "Let's order Chinese." That's amateur behaviour. First, you establish which C...