“Prithviraj Kapoor was a close friend of my grandfather and a frequent visitor to my grandparents’ home,” Chef Anishka Bose tells me. “In fact, they started cooking mutton at home despite being vegetarian Vaishnavites because of him.”

It’s a Thursday afternoon in Kolkata, and we are on our way to Salud — a supper club hosted by Anishka at her childhood home in Kalighat, right next to the historic Menoka Cinema on Sarat Chatterjee Avenue. Her grandfather, Debaki Kumar Bose, was a pioneering filmmaker who revolutionised both Bengali and Hindi cinema. His 1934 film ‘Seeta’ was the first Indian film screened at the Venice Film Festival, where it won an Honorary Diploma, making him the first Indian filmmaker to win an international award. But this story isn’t about him. It’s about Anishka and Salud, the supper club she started almost exactly a year ago.

An alumnus of St. Xavier’s College in Kolkata, Anishka studied audiovisual production and journalism before pivoting to the culinary arts. She received formal training at the Culinary Arts Academy in Switzerland, followed by a six-month stint at Sapori, a Michelin-guided Italian restaurant at the Victoria-Jungfrau Hotel in Interlaken. Standing in a speciality grocery aisle in an Alipore supermarket earlier that evening, she told me she was the only woman in that kitchen: “...and the only woman of colour.”

Was there a specific moment, a rite of passage, that made her realise that she’d earned her place there?

“Yes,” she answered. “I mostly worked in the cold kitchen during my time there, but during one service, my co-worker Mark caught the flu. The Chef de Cuisine told me I had to take care of the cold section all by myself. I had to make the appetisers, the salads, the ice cream, and the dessert. He was apprehensive that I could handle it. But at the end of the night, everything went perfectly. Everything was on time, and we had no complaints from the guests. We covered almost 500 people during dinner service that night. That’s when I knew.”

Anishka returned to Kolkata and opened Salud in April 2025, in the dining room of her childhood home.

What she is participating in — and, in Kolkata at least, building — is one of the more interesting culinary movements to emerge from the pandemic years, when many people, like her, returned to their hometown and decided to stay. The supper club is not a new idea. It has antecedents in the salon culture of 18th-century Europe, in the private dining societies of mid-century London, and in the unlicensed dinner parties that proliferated across American cities in the 2010s. But in India, the concept arrived with a sense of urgency in the aftermath of 2020 and found a population that had spent two years eating at home and, in the process, rediscovering just how much the home table could contain.

Early iterations of the supper club in India were informal and almost communal in spirit, hosted by amateurs with a knack for cooking, often planned in WhatsApp group chats, and were limited to the host’s extended social circle. Salud is an evolution of that concept — it belongs squarely to the second wave of Indian supper clubs led by trained chefs, many of them returning from stints abroad, who have consciously chosen the intimacy of the home kitchen and dining table over the efficiency of a restaurant setting. When Anishka started Salud, Kolkata had four or five supper clubs, she says. Now the number is between fifteen and twenty. That growing number represents a generational and cultural shift as much as a market one. As people increasingly seek connection through curated social gatherings, supper clubs have emerged as a compelling alternative. Their appeal lies in the mix of spontaneity, inclusivity, and insider allure, paired with great food and drinks at a set price. The global resurgence of supper clubs and communal dining signals a wider shift in nightlife culture — one that is reshaping how we now spend our time and money and challenging the long-held dominance of star-rated hotels and restaurants.

The distinction between a supper club and a pop-up, Anishka explains, is not simply logistical. “Whereas a pop-up might be more interested in selling the food, a supper club, hosted at someone’s home, is more focused on providing an experience, an atmosphere, and the strange intimacy of dining with strangers.”

Do you have regulars who keep coming back? I ask her.

“Sometimes,” she says. But most of the time it’s new people, she explains, friends of friends or previous guests who want to try something new. “We have been growing through word of mouth and Instagram,” she says.

"Something new" is a great way to describe the kind of food Anishka serves at Salud. The following Saturday after our Thursday market run, I had the chance to experience Salud’s spring tasting menu: ‘Bel Er Sour’, an elevated take on Bel-er Shorbot, a traditional Bengali summer cooler; ‘Burrata Paratha Pizette’, a reinvention of the flatbread pizza your mother may have made for you when you returned home from school in the late 90s; ‘Carrot, Chicken & Randhuni Cream Soup’, a French classic with Bengali twists; followed by ‘Aam, Avocado & Prawn Ceviche’, ‘Pan Seared Chicken Kebab on Labneh’, ‘Goat Curry Orzo’ — an Italian classic spiced up with the introduction of a rich Bengali laal jhol — and a smooth Mango Coconut Panna Cotta for dessert.

The cuisine at Salud can be categorised at Modern Bengali — a phrase that risks sounding like a marketing gimmick until you understand what she actually means by it. She is not producing fusion. She is producing culinary and cultural memory at a slight remove from itself, using the technical vocabulary she acquired in Switzerland to do something her training wasn’t designed for: to make Bengali flavours feel new and recognisable at once. “I don’t have a recipe book,” she told me when we first met at the supermarket on a Thursday afternoon. She doesn’t go by measures, which is antithetical to her formal European training. She goes by instinct, like most Bengali women do in their home kitchens. “Everything is impromptu,” she says, “and yet, thankfully, it always comes together.”

Anishka’s dream, eventually, is to open a café — something more permanent than a Saturday night supper club. She talks about it the way people talk about wishes upon stars, as if it might not come true if you want it too much. But for now, on Saturday evenings, with limited seating, a curated tasting menu that changes with each gathering, and her childhood home lit for dinner service, she has something more immediate and tangible to focus on: a meal she has never cooked before, made from instinct and experience, for a table of strangers who will leave, by the end of the night, feeling less like strangers than they did at the beginning. That, more than any single dish, is perhaps what she is actually making at Salud.

Follow @salud.cal on Instagram.

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