New take on Indian takeout
At times this season, Dr. Shishir Bhattacharya stands outside his new ethnic eatery on a commercial cul-de-sac in Ardsley and beholds with wonder what he and partners have wrought. Calcutta Wrap and Roll, their takeout Indian restaurant, opened this fall at 465 Ashford Ave., after a year of construction delays and tripled start-up costs and a lifetime of culinary study and preparation by the doctor.
“I had this dream for a long time,” said Bhattacharya, an obstetrician and gynecologist at Westchester Woman”™s Care in Yonkers, the private practice he started in 1987. His OB/GYN partner in Yonkers, Dr. Hugo Cocucci, also is a partner at Calcutta Wrap and Roll. “I was thinking about it a thousand times. I never thought it would come to fruition,” Bhattacharya said.
The doctors are joined in the novel start-up by their wives, Sumita Bhattacharya and Maria Cocucci, and a third couple bringing family recipes from Westchester”™s Indian community, Chitta and Sohini Saha. Their company, SMS Foods Inc., is named after the three women partners, who oversee daily operations. The takeout café  has three full-time and about seven part-time employees.
Raised in Bombay, India”™s most populous city that is now called Mumbai, Bhattacharya returns to his native country for two weeks every year. He spends the first week providing free medical services at hospitals to impoverished patients ”“ what the returning native, a fourth-generation physician in his family, calls “payback time.” The second week is devoted to the doctor”™s “continuous culinary education” in authentic Indian dishes and their long-evolved preparation.
Indian cooking and food buff
Bhattacharya is a student of both Indian cooking and the history of food, especially in its storied developments in India on the routes of the spice trade and empire. In his continuing education, he travels among restaurants trying various dishes and asks to be taught how to prepare them. “I”™ve been doing that 30 years now,” he said.
Dissecting a dish”™s layering of spices with a surgeon”™s precision, Bhattacharya also serves an erudite commentary on how its ingredients and preparations found their way into Indian cooking. Grabbing a pen, he briskly charts in a reporter”™s notebook the regional linguistic strains of Indian dishes that empire-builders of the British East India Co. reduced to that universal phenomenon, “curry.”
The British sprinkled their curry powder over all foods, homogenizing taste and earning his grandmother”™s disdain of its use in the kitchen, said Bhattacharya. In home-style Indian cooking, “Each spice has to be used in different ways,” he said. Many of those spices and dishes arrived in India in the 14th century with Portuguese explorers and traders. The doctor plans to add some of that history to the restaurant menu.
His business partner, Dr. Cocucci, said the partners opened Calcutta Wrap and Roll “to really give an option to what Americans have come to know as Indian food.” The Ardsley menu includes regional dishes prepared in Indian homes ”“ such as Sohini Saha”™s recipe for shrimp shorshe, a mustard-sauce dish from Calcutta – that one will not find in traditional Indian restaurants, he said.
“I don”™t want just another Indian restaurant,” Bhattacharya said. “What I would like to have is a different kind, something that I eat at home. We started on the premise that what we eat at home and what we eat in the restaurants are two different things.”
For Bhattacharya “Cooking has always been a hobby, and I use as a release” from the pressures of his medical practice, he said. He personally trained in his Irvington home the café”™s two Indian chefs, whom he hired after interviewing 14 applicants.
A long road to a grand opening
The cooks were on the company payroll for 16 months before Calcutta Wrap and Roll opened in November. Bhattacharya said the opening was set back nearly a year as the partners dealt with municipal regulatory requirements and contractors”™ delays in part caused by Consolidated Edison”™s seasonal shutdown of trench-digging work for electrical lines. When the partners decided to expand on their store”™s initial footprint and build out an 1,100-square-foot space in adjacent vacant storefronts, new architectural design plans and a new round of code-compliance inspections were required.
For new businesses in a municipality, “I wish that there was a guideline” on the steps to follow in the regulatory process, said Bhattacharya. Instead, “You have to find out for yourself every single time.”
The delays and unexpected expenses have made the partners”™ start-up costs about three times higher than their initial estimate. “The investment has been substantial,” said Bhattacharya, without giving a specific figure. “What we estimated and what we ended up with are very different.”
“We really didn”™t expect it to take this long,” he said. “That”™s what took time, the rules and regulations. They are very restrictive”¦ It was nobody”™s fault, yet it was everybody”™s, as we started going through every legal hoop. We wish we had anticipated that. We did not. The next one, we will.”
The takeout opening has drawn ethnic customers from Westchester”™s community of about 5,000 Indian residents, said Bhattacharya, a former president of India Center of Westchester. Yet 60 percent to 70 percent of customers have been non-Indian local residents. Ethnic restaurants like his need those customers to succeed in business, he said.