Calcutta carries its history on its sleeve, through decades of damp monsoons, political posturing, and the persistence of domestic habits. Walking through the city brings you past literary salons, adda sessions, colonial architecture, and neighbourhood restaurants whose menus still carry traces of Calcutta’s late-colonial relationship with continental food. Park Street remains the ceremonial spine of this nocturnal geography — a corridor that once dictated how the country drank and danced, populated by cavernous dining rooms and bandstands that have long since calcified into folklore.

In recent years, the city's hospitality scene has begun to make room for new ideas. Younger restaurateurs, independent roasters, and culinary entrepreneurs have been experimenting with formats that move beyond the nostalgia associated with legacy venues. From specialty coffee bars operating out of residential alleyways to dining spaces celebrating indigenous ingredients, a range of new establishments are finding their footing. Some are bringing regional Bengali culinary traditions onto modern menus, while others are looking at supply chains and the possibilities of building a contemporary food culture in a city that has spent decades trading on its past victories.

Against this setting, In My Room enters the conversation with a premise of its own. The twenty seat cocktail bar on Park Street was conceived by Pankaj Balachandran, who developed the concept alongside chef Auroni Mookerjee and restaurateurs Abhimanyu Maheshwari and Ramesh Kumar Agarwal. It makes few references to regional heritage or Bengali culinary culture. Its windowless, enclosed room is designed to offer guests a measure of distance from the city outside, allowing the experience within to take precedence. The room has its own identity, shaped by the tastes and references of the people who made it, even as it resists any direct attempt to represent the location in which it stands.

This raises an older, more stubborn question about hospitality: what does an F&B establishment owe the city housing it? Does a room need to mirror geography to earn a place in the local consciousness?

The architecture of escape functions without sliding into pastiche. Spanning approximately three hundred and fifty square feet, the physical footprint remains compact, with a workstation designed around the movement of the bartenders. Counters curve around the room, while jazz posters, cassette tapes and other pop culture references offer glimpses into the interests of the people behind it. The absence of windows is central to Balachandran's intention for the space, allowing the team to regulate its temperature, lighting and acoustics.

Balachandran’s previous ventures, including Boilermaker and Quinta Cantina in Goa, offer a useful point of comparison. “At Boilermaker, we were working with an open shack. There were things we couldn't control,” he says. In My Room gives him the scope to work through details of lighting, sound and service with a level of precision that an open-air bar could not offer.

The ambition is to construct a hospitality experience capable of standing alongside peer establishments across New York or London or Asian metropolitan hubs, through a format that remains relatively uncommon in the domestic market. Balachandran describes the venture as a passion and a legacy project, acknowledging the commercial considerations that come with running a twenty-seat bar. He also speaks about making something that reflects the people behind it. “The most personal concepts are often the most universal,” he says. The details that matter to a creator can find an audience beyond their immediate circle. The room's references may come from his own interests, but guests are invited to find their own associations within them.

When Conversation Room launched two years prior, Balachandran observed that Calcutta’s audience was being asked to digest advanced beverage concepts before the city's cocktail culture had developed a larger audience for them. He describes Calcutta’s development, “The city has to learn how to walk before it can run.” He believes that the audience is now ready to explore more specialised cocktail programmes. “You need the pie to grow, otherwise the pie is over,” he says, making the case for bringing more people into cocktail culture before expecting the scene to sustain increasingly specialised offerings. In My Room is an expression of his confidence in that next stage.

Behind the counter, bartender Dheeraj Bhatt translates this ambition into liquid form. Bhatt’s background spans fine dining service and coastal beach bars, influencing how he approaches the floor. Time spent in professional kitchens taught him how courses progress, how flavours resolve, and how service responds to the pace of a meal. His time in Goa also introduced him to spirits such as mezcal and feni, while working alongside Japanese bartenders shaped his interest in the mechanics of cocktail-making, from the movement of a stir to the rhythm of a shake.

At In My Room, the service style is more measured than the animated performance associated with high-volume venues. The twenty-seat room calls for a different kind of interaction, where the drinks menu focuses on technical precision, flavour extraction and restrained proportions. Bhatt describes the brief as one of simplicity and accuracy: “The drinks have to be technically correct. We focus on measurements and proportions, and use simple techniques to extract flavour.” He is equally conscious of keeping the ingredient count in check. “You don't need seven or eight or nineteen ingredients in a drink,” he says. “A few ingredients, used well, can give you the flavour and layers you're looking for.”

The menu ranges from highballs and sours to creamy textures and savoury profiles, with drinks like the Mango and Oolong Ramos bringing together tea, seasonal fruit and a traditional dairy-emulsion format. Bhatt's approach gives the central flavours room to come through, with technique doing much of the work.

The room's scale makes that relationship between bartender and guest especially apparent. He has to work within a service style that differs from the one he experienced at Boilermaker, where the atmosphere allowed for louder exchanges and a more animated approach. At In My Room, he says, “You can't shout across the bar. You have to be more conscious of how you speak and how you move.” The proximity of the guests makes every action visible; as he puts it, “There's no room to hide.” The workstation, measurements and pace of service all have to work in tandem.

This commitment to technical rigour extends into the kitchen, where the food menu gives familiar cravings the attention of a restaurant kitchen. Developed with input from Adyant Roy and Pranshu Bhagat on R&D, and Natalia Peters on pastry, the menu takes its cues from the kind of indulgent food you might put together for friends. As Roy describes it, the idea was to give these familiar combinations the treatment of a restaurant kitchen while holding on to the pleasure that makes them appealing in the first place.

A prominent example is the ham-and-cheese choux, where the shell is stuffed with ham, cheese and truffle, coated in breadcrumbs and deep-fried. Posh Potatoes draw on another familiar reference: sour cream and onion chips. During menu development, the team discussed their favourite packaged snack flavours, including the ones they couldn't stand. That conversation eventually fed into the dish, which uses Hasselback potatoes paired with hot sauce and blue cheese. The team even explored the flavour of “Green” Lays as a reference point. A packet of chips becomes the starting point for a dish that carries the same familiar combination of tang, salt and indulgence into a restaurant kitchen.

As independent establishments across the city begin exploring indigenous ingredients, regional rice varieties and local supply chains, Balachandran’s establishment looks outward, trusting that personal obsession transcends geographic borders. The distinction becomes interesting when placed alongside Yokocho, the other Park Street establishment created by the same hospitality partners. Drawing on Japanese alleyway bars and Asian street-food traditions, Yokocho also brings the idea of the khau galli into its understanding of the dining experience. The two spaces offer different approaches to their surroundings, shaped by the same group's interests and interpretations of hospitality.

This approach makes In My Room neither anomaly nor outsider. Cities accommodate multiple truths simultaneously, proving that a healthy ecosystem requires spaces that draw from local histories alongside spaces built as an alternate dimension. A room shaped by its maker's own references does not need to mirror the streets outside to earn its keep. Ultimately, In My Room belongs to the city precisely by offering its residents a place to look inward, cutting away the weight of the geography they navigate every day.

If you enjoyed reading this, here's more from Homegrown:

Some Whitney Houston With Your Pie: Homegrown F&B Professionals Tell How They 'Cook' With Sound

An Ode To Rebirth: Kolam Brings Southern Sri Lanka’s Masked Theatre To Paris

Monkeys & Mountain Broth Magic: A Runaway’s Guide To Kasauli