Kathi Rolls of Kolkata

In 1932, when Nizam’s Restaurant sold its first kebab, the city then known as Calcutta was no longer the capital of Britain’s holdings in South Asia. For almost 140 years, since the city was first established by the East India Company in 1772 and built to resemble a European capital city, until 1911 when “King of the United Kingdoms and British Dominions, Emperor of India” George V of England moved the Indian capital to Delhi. By the mid-19th Century, British colonists were a minority in the capital city, amounting to roughly 1.5% of its population, but held outsized authority over the area due to the East India Company’s military power.

That minority population of British colonists, tired of the need to share public spaces with the Bengalis and other South Asian people native to that area, demanded a new, “Whites-Only” market be built in Calcutta and in 1874 the New Market opened in Lindsay Street, replacing a mixed bazaar that had previously been sited there. 150 years later, the market is now often cited as a perfect microcosm of Kolkata’s diverse populace–and though I have not identified a specific date when it was desegregated, I got the impression in my research that the locals didn’t take long in gaining access to the market. There are over 2000 shops hosted on the site, many of which date back to the early days of the 20th Century.

And when Nizam’s opened in 1932, it may still have been serving some European clientele, but it was serving them an entirely Indian menu consisting largely of kebabs and paratha flatbreads. The way the story is told now, the European customers didn’t like touching the kebabs or the flatbreads, as they were too oily. Yet they appreciated the food itself, and the convenience of ordering it from a street food stall, since they were always on the go. So the shop owner hit upon the idea of wrapping the kebab in the flatbread, then wrapping that in paper before handing it to the customer. The kebabs, cooked on bamboo skewers called kati or kathi in the local Bengali language, were often called kathi kebabs; the wrap that resulted from folding them in flatbread was called a kathi roll.

For a time, Nizam’s was the sole seller of these kathi rolls, but innovation breeds simulation and the rolls eventually became popular all over Kolkata, and eventually followed the Desi Diaspora to its diverse destinations: to the UK, to the US, and Canada. These days, you can buy frozen kati rolls in Indian markets in the US, and some of the larger markets, such as Patel Brothers, might have a food stand in the back selling several kinds, premade. At the Patel Brothers location in Naperville recently, there were 4 kinds available, sitting under heat lamps. Only three of them were labeled–veg, paneer, and pizza–and when I asked for one of each they stuck all four in the same box and rung them all up as paneer kathi rolls. So I have no idea which was which, or what the fourth flavor might have been. They were fine if I thought of them as South Asian Hot Pockets.

Back when I was researching Naan Sandwiches in 2017, there was a place on Devon Avenue in Chicago called Meerath Kabab House that had a few Kathi Rolls on the menu. At the time, I was focusing on naan so I requested a behari kebab roll wrapped in naan instead of paratha. The behari roll was filled with strips of flame-cooked beef tenderloin with a small amount of dark-colored gravy and plenty of raw onions. I wasn’t a fan, but I remembered them offering Kathi rolls and stopped by that corner earlier this month to get one.

Unfortunately Meerath Kabab House is long gone, and I have been having a new difficulty in researching restaurants that serve very specific uncommon dishes lately. I feel positive it is AI-related. For instance, if I google “kathi roll chicago” I get a long list of Indian restaurants in my results. As I go through each result and peruse their menus, I can’t help but notice–none of these places serve a kathi roll. It’s as if Google sees my request and instead of sending me the short list of 2 or 3 relevant results that I actually want, it takes the extra step and decides that since kathi rolls are Indian food, I might like to see every place in Chicago that serves Indian food instead of the more targeted results I’m actually looking for.

Do better, Google. Lose the AI, it’s garbage.

But across the street from where Meerath once was, I saw a place called Karahi Corner and on a whim stopped in. I asked the young man working the front of house if they had kathi rolls. “No, we only serve Indian food,” he replied. Now there are a lot of different Indian cuisines, and kathi rolls come from Kolkata in the east Indian province of West Bengal. Also, it’s very likely I wasn’t pronouncing it correctly. So I tried to explain to him what I was looking for, some kind of kebab or curry wrapped up in flatbread, and he offered to have them whip me up some chicken boti in a wrap, calling it a “boti roll.” I looked for it on the menu without success, but it was pretty satisfying, again substituting a thin naan for the paratha that a kathi roll would use.

But I found actual kathi rolls at a restaurant called Cuisine of India in Naperville. Mindy and I had lunch there on our recent 27th anniversary. She ordered a lunch special called Mutton Feast, featuring a mutton masala, dal maakhni, rice, naan, 3 small samosas, and a gulab jamun along with garnishes.

As for me–Cuisine of India offers 3 kinds of kathi rolls, a mutton seekh kebab roll, a chicken roll, and a vegetarian paneer option. I ordered two. The Seekh kebab had a little kick to it, well-wrapped, with big chunks of red pepper and onion wrapped into the thin flatbread along with the soft kebab.

The chicken was very good, small bits of highly spiced chicken sauteed with peppers and onions and stuffed into a flatbread that, truth be told, fell apart as soon as I tried to pick it up. It was delicious though.

But where I had once anticipated this post involving visiting many area restaurants and trying many differing takes on the kathi roll, reality had diverged from my expectations. Either the kathi roll is less popular in Chicago than I had anticipated, or the enshittification of the internet has made my search for less common delicacies an order of magnitude more difficult than it was 10 years ago when we started this site.

So I’d have to make it myself.

I reached out to Mallika Basu, author of Indian cookbooks Masala: Indian Cooking for Modern Living and Miss Masala: Real Indian Cooking for Busy Living, the voice behind Substack newsletter More than curry, and creator of charming food videos on the Tiktok platform, where she and I have chatted on a few occasions. I asked Mallika if she had any kathi roll recipes she could share, as I’d checked her website and did not find any there. She sent me this link to the Food and Travel Magazine website, which recreates one of the recipes from her Masala cookbook (which I have since acquired and I recommend).

The recipe on that page does not contain instructions for making parathas (though her cookbook does) other than to warm them “following the instructions on the packet.” I have researched making parathas and it seems really hard, so I have taken this as tacit permission from Mallika to use premade, frozen parathas. Thanks, Mallika!

Her recipe also calls for quick-pickling slices of red onion and chili peppers in lemon juice to be used as a condiment / garnish and frankly, these would improve the majority of sandwiches.

Mallika’s kebabs are made with chicken thigh meat marinated in yogurt and mustard oil with turmeric, kashmiri chilli powder, cumin, coriander, and garam masala, along with fresh garlic and ginger. I cooked them over a propane grill (it was raining that day and charcoal was going to be too much work) and they turned out delicious, fragrant with warm spices, a little spicy kick from the kashmiri chilli powder (and the small amount of cayenne I supplemented it with) and a penetrating, lingering mustard oil presence that loomed in my sinuses the rest of the day.

So to assemble the kathi roll, we start with a paratha

Add our chicken

and garnish with the pickled red onions and chilies, and some chopped cilantro.

Then just roll it over, pick it up, and dig in. I haven’t cooked with mustard oil before–though I had a bottle on hand that has been awaiting its opportunity–and I was surprised both by how strongly the flavor permeated everything and by how subtle it was, simultaneously. There was not a strong mustard flavor but there was an omnipresent, hovering reminder of the potential effects of glucosinolates on ones sinuses without actually triggering that extreme reaction. I am not describing it well. But it was not a primary flavor here, taking a backseat to the floral coriander, the earthy turmeric and cumin, the warming garam masala, the lush crisp surface and fatty interior of the chicken thighs, the bright lemon-spiked pungency of the red onion and the bits of hot chili pepper tangled up in its matrix. Mindy dressed hers with a little yogurt to help tame the fieriness of the chicken marinade but it was not overwhelmingly spicy, just full-flavored, hitting all the spots.

There are plenty of different fillings that can go into a Kathi roll, and I look forward to trying more of them in the future. But thanks again for hooking me up with that recipe, Mallika! This is the best thing I’ve eaten in a while.