Olypub’s legendary Chateaubriand: A Park Street classic that defined a generation

I love the beef steak they serve at Olypub, on Kolkata's Park Street, the establishment founded in 1947 and that went under the name of Olympia Bar and Restaurant till 1981. Grandly, it's called 'Chateaubriand Steak'. But it's a very distant relative indeed of the great 19th c. dish invented by Chef Montmireil for his master Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, then French ambassador to Britain. The Olypub Chateaubriand is a beef fillet that comes with roast potatoes, onion gravy, and a fried egg on top, with some boiled carrots and beans on the side.

Unlike in fancier places, you don't get to order how you want the steak. It always comes between medium and well-done, but with the meat still tender. In the old days, this dish was something you ordered only when the whole gang was feeling rich and there was something to celebrate.

I was introduced to Oly in the early 1980s. It was then the cheapest joint on Park Street. Amid Sky Room, Blue Fox, Bar-B-Q, and Kwality - Oly was famous for three things. First, it was downright dingy. The old decor of dark wooden boards, dirty mirrors, and rexine seemed to disintegrate as you sat there, grimy tubelights throwing their tired glow on battered, sunmica-topped tables. Rats scurried across the filthy, tattered, once-maroon carpet. The waiters even had names for them.


Second, and most importantly, the drink at Olypub was ludicrously cheap. Finally, most of the food on the menu was terrible. But the one area where Olypub punched above its weight was beef steak.

After travelling and tasting meat cookery around the world, the reason became obvious on returning to Calcutta: most other, pricier places were serving hamburger steak - a large mince patty, whereas Olypub served the real thing, a proper fillet cut from tenderloin.

It's not like we 20-somethings could afford steak every time we visited. On our journalists' salaries and freelancers' scrapings, we mostly made do with beer (₹15 a big bottle) and rum (₹12 for 60 ml), carefully sifting through the grimy plates of mixture to make sure there were no lizard droppings. Occasionally we'd do a mini-splurge and get French fries and pork sausages. When gora backpacker friends would be passing through and would insist on 'eating Indian', some second-grade mutton seekh, chicken reshmi kababs and sad paneer-gravy-type dishes were added.

In the '80s-'90s, Oly was a zone. There were downstairs regulars and upstairs regulars. There were obscure poets and wannabe filmmakers. There was the famous Naxal-killer cop who was also a shayar and khayal expert. There were 'couples' who came upstairs into the 'Family Section' for a groping session because a room was not yet available on Free School Street.

All this was a far cry from the establishment's heydays as a hangout for jaunty young horserace punters, and a place where the city's ad agencies came for bingeing. Satyajit Ray may have sat downstairs many times, in the large men-only section, nursing a nimbu-soda. Jazz musicians from adjacent restaurants may have used this as an affordable meeting point. But all that was long gone by the time I started calling Oly 'my office' in the 1980s.

On Thursdays, West Bengal used to have a dry day, the day being the payday when workers' salaries needed to be protected from alcoholic denudation. If one walked past Oly on a Thursday evening, you'd see through the glass panes a strange sight: waiters in their normal clothes facing west, doing namaaz. Most of these men came from one village in Odisha, and Friday was too busy a day for them to be able to get to the masjid. All week long, these uncles, nephews, and cousins slung alcohol, pork sausages, crispy bacon, and the famous steak, without partaking of any of it. On this one day, they prayed.

Seeing this after returning from provincialised metros across West and North India, we were glad to be living in a beat-up, but truly cosmopolitan city where people of different ethnicities, beliefs, and tastes could live together peaceably.