This Durga Puja, Mohona is reimagining Bengali food through a supper club

As a Bengali living away from Bengal, I have a fairly predictable relationship with Durga Puja: the closer it gets, the more I miss my mother’s food, the crowded streets of Kolkata, and the all-pervading smell of shiuli flowers. There are some cravings that no restaurant menu can quite explain, let alone fix. 

This year, a supper club of all things snapped me out of my Pujo blues. Mohona, a pre-Pujo collaboration between Toontooni’s Table by Toonika Guha and Biraajo by Vidip Shah, brings Bengali flavours to the table in forms you might not immediately recognise. Shukto broth, prawn-head-infused butter and malai chingri pasta might sound like a departure from the Bengali food you know, but that's precisely the appeal. This is a menu that takes familiar flavours seriously enough to play around with them.

Mohona brings a fresh take on Bengali food

Take the shukto broth, for instance. The bitter vegetable dish traditionally opens a Bengali meal, preparing the palate for what's to come. At Mohona, those flavours find a new expression in a delicate vegetable consommé.

Bakharkhani, the flaky Dhakai bread, arrives with two kinds of butter: posto for vegetarians and prawn-head-infused butter for everyone else. The latter is rich, intensely fragrant and well worth ordering. There's also a peyaz posto crunch, which takes the familiar combination of onion and poppy seeds and serves it on a rice cracker. These aren't reinventions for the sake of novelty. They draw on flavours that already work, then give them a different texture, context or form.

The more adventurous combinations are just as compelling. The Galda Chingri Malai Curry Pasta brings fresh prawn-filled pasta together with a coconut-based malai curry sauce. It's an unlikely pairing on paper, but the richness of the curry makes a convincing companion to the pasta. For those who prefer their Bengali food closer to home, Luchi and Mangsho Sorshe delivers the comfort of hot, deep-fried luchi with mustard-forward mutton. The vegetarian alternative, yam in malai curry, makes sure the same combination of indulgence and familiarity carries through. 

Gondhoraj gimlets, anyone?

The drinks and dessert follow a similar instinct. The Gondhoraj Gimlet pairs the unmistakable citrus of gondhoraj lebu with a solid pour of dry gin. If the smell of the fruit brings back memories of summer afternoons and the sharbat waiting at home, the cocktail offers a more grown-up way to revisit them. At the other end of the meal, burnt-butter chocolate-chip ice cream comes with Goyna bori, the intricately shaped lentil fritter that is as much a part of Bengal's culinary heritage as it is a visual delight. Its crunch against the creamy, sweet ice cream makes for an unexpected finish.

A community-first Bengali supper club

But a Bengali meal has never been only about what's on the plate. Mohona leans into the other essential ingredient: a sense of community. This is the sort of supper club where food gives strangers something to talk about, plates are passed around for everyone to try, and nobody is in a hurry to leave. Anyone who's grown up around Bengali family meals will know the drill: personal boundaries become fairly flexible when somebody else's order looks particularly good. The format makes room for precisely that kind of easy, unhurried gathering.

That's what makes Mohona worth keeping an eye out for. The menu offers a playful take on Bengali food without losing sight of the flavours and memories that make it meaningful, while the supper club format gives you the time and company to enjoy it properly. You get the pleasure of discovering something new, along with the comfort of recognising something old.

More supper clubs to look out for in Delhi

While Mohona was a one-off collaboration with Biraajo this year, Toontooni’s Table is back with another Bengali dining experience this Pujo, ADDA: The Pujo Table, at Anjeer in Gurugram on October 17.