“Cooking does not begin with a ‘should.’ It is a response, an emotion.”
That is Sohini Banerjee’s approach to carving her life around the kitchen. She has spent much of her life moving between food cultures. Born in Kolkata, she later moved to London and grew up with Bengali food at home. Her mother adapted the food she knew to the ingredients available around her. Banerjee then encountered many other cuisines through her travels and exposure in London. So when she began cooking professionally, those experiences coalesced into informing her choices.
It is why her food can move seamlessly from maachh-er matha diye dal to sriracha and sambar gnocchi without sounding like fusion. In fact, she does not like the term. A zucchini finding its way into a dish traditionally made with lau (bottle gourd) is a byproduct of lived experience, as food always has been. It is why a supperclub that began in a one-bedroom flat has become less about reproducing a menu from Bengal and more about creating a place where people can sit down, eat and talk.
For Banerjee, the plate is where these things meet: memory, necessity, geography, seasonality and the people sitting around the table.
Appetiser: The Plunge
Banerjee did not set out to become a chef. Her academic background is in health economics and international health policy, and she initially entered the corporate world. It did not take her long to realise that it was not where she wanted to be.
“Getting into the world of cooking was a matter of taking a plunge,” she says. “The corporate setting did not suit me at all.”
This plunge was not a single dramatic decision; it came through a series of experiences. During her MSc in London, she had the chance to work with Asma Khan, and her first job was at a Michelin-starred restaurant. Later, she became an operations manager across two restaurants in Soho. Through a process of self-discovery and her own experiences, she stumbled into taking the kitchen seriously. She worked in local cafes, cleaned dishes and also worked in management.
London already had a supperclub culture, and Banerjee eventually found a format that allowed her to cook without having to fit herself into the structure of a conventional restaurant. In 2018, she started Smoke and Lime with her partner, Rijul, from their tiny one-bedroom flat in North London.
The idea was simple: bring people around one table and cook the Bengali food she learnt, while letting it breathe in the influences of Calcutta, London and beyond. Memories of her childhood, especially her grandfather, Habu, had a role to play. She remembers him buying long red chillies, cleaning and de-seeding them by hand, stuffing them with spices and leaving them in mustard oil on the rooftop to catch the sun. His remains the standard she wants to reach with her achar.
Main Course: The Same Food, A Different Table
“When I think of organising a supper club in Kolkata versus in London, my creative thought process is very different. In the UK, Bengali food is a rarity. In Kolkata, it is normal.”
In London, she has to introduce people to flavours and ways of eating they may not be familiar with. In Kolkata, familiarity creates a different challenge. “I had to get creative with the naming and preparation to appeal to the audience.”
The distinction can be seen in her maachh-er matha diye dal, for instance. The dish itself did not need to be reinvented. Banerjee cooked the dal as her grandmother would have. What she changed was the way the fish was handled: she triple-fried the salmon head and collar until crisp, almost treating them like chicken wings, and placed them on top of the dal.
The result was a change in perception rather than a change in the dish’s identity. That is also where the question of “fusion” becomes complicated for her.
“Fusion food cannot be a genre or an anomaly,” Banerjee says. “Food and cooking practices are, by their very nature, a combination of different flavours.” The Bengali food now called authentic emerged from colonial influences, migration, availability, and circumstance. Her own cooking follows the same logic.
That response can mean mustard oil and green chillies alongside miso, gochujang, sambar or homemade chilli oil. It can mean a traditional preparation presented differently. It can mean using what the local market offers. What it does not mean is cooking to satisfy an idea of what another audience expects Bengali food to be. Banerjee cooks what she herself would want to eat.
Side Dish: Nothing Is Really Waste
Her approach to waste does not begin with contemporary sustainability language. It begins with familial approaches to minimum-waste cooking. Her grandmothers and earlier generations had to make do with what they had during lean periods, which meant using every part of an ingredient.
At Smoke and Lime, one of her no-waste dishes is patha bata, or pasted leaves. She takes the leaves and stems of seasonal vegetables, often cauliflower, and adds onion and garlic skins, along with other parts left over from preparing other dishes. The vegetables are roasted until caramelised, then blended with mustard oil. Depending on the dish, she might add confit garlic, fried garlic or fresh chillies.
The same history shapes her understanding of authenticity. Her grandmother’s cooking was shaped by famine and colonialism, and adaptation was part of that history. If those circumstances changed what earlier generations cooked, there is little reason for food to stop adapting now.
Interlude: Nostalgia Is Not The Opposite Of Experimentation
“The key to my cooking is experimentation and nostalgia. Food needs to be responsive; it cannot be stagnant. It is like an art form which grows and adapts every day, everywhere.”
Banerjee for instance, can take inspiration from a dish she ate years ago and change its context through an ingredient she encountered elsewhere. She recalls making a Naga black sesame pork dish and serving it with black quinoa but later realising she only wanted to eat it with heritage black rice and not jump on a trend like quinoa. Instagram food pages offer little nuggets of information without explaining the wider processes behind them, thus depriving one of that knowledge.
Her own comfort food goes in the other direction. Ghee, bhaat (steamed rice), aloo sheddo (boiled potatoes), salt, lime, mustard oil and green chilli are enough. Add homemade achar, and the meal is complete.
Dessert: The Table Is The Point
The food may bring people to Smoke and Lime, but the community is what keeps the idea going. The supperclub traditionally brings 10 diners around one table. The menus change, but the purpose remains the same: to create a setting where people can eat, talk and feel at home.
This is why Banerjee is reluctant to think of opening a restaurant. She wants to create a sense of community wherever she goes. Rather than build a permanent physical business, she wants to build a brand associated with herself that can move between countries and cities. Her work, therefore, includes cooking, consulting, food education and supper clubs. There is a practical reason for this, but there is also something cultural underneath it. In the food culture Banerjee grew up with, cooking was not only about putting food on a plate. Family members cooked together, and food carried stories with it. As people cook less collectively, some of that exchange can disappear.
Her supper club puts people back into that setting, even if they did not grow up with Bengali food. That is also why the food does not have to be explained away before it is eaten. A diner can arrive without knowing what maachh-er matha diye dal is and encounter it through the meal, the table and the conversation around it.
Aftertaste: Let The Recipe Travel
Food has a structure and formula, but it is also about seasonality, mood, temperature and feeling.
Her dishes make sense within that framework. A dal can remain a dal while its fish is triple-fried. A vegetable can be cooked with a substitute because that is what the market provides. Leaves and stems can become the main part of another dish. Gnocchi can carry sriracha and podi or a homemade lahpet using leftover kombucha tea leaves . And rice with ghee and aloo sheddo can still be the meal that feels most like home.
Kolkata remains the place where many of these ideas return. Banerjee misses its seasonal produce and the way food changes with the weather: lau in summer, koraishuti in winter. When she is there, she finds inspiration simply by walking through the city, particularly around Lake Market and Jadubabu Bajar. The markets, windows, flower sellers and colours become part of how she thinks about food.
The journey, then, is not really from Kolkata to London and back. It is a continuous movement between the two, along with the many tangents that continue to inspire her. Banerjee’s Bengali food travels and adapts, because Bengali food itself has always travelled. Perhaps that is the simplest way to understand Smoke and Lime: not as a restaurant without a permanent address, or a supperclub built around a particular cuisine, but as a table where a living food and art tradition can keep changing without losing the memory of where it came from.
(With inputs and images from Sohini Banerjee)
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