One of Kolkata’s fondest connections with Kiev will remain that way.
Mocambo’s Chicken A La Kiev will continue to be called Kiev and not Kyiv.
“I am not going to change it. Because it is a heritage dish. It has been there for almost 70 years. I want to emphasise that this is one of our oldest dishes. It is part of a history that needs no tampering,” Nitin Kothari, owner of Mocambo, told The Telegraph on Saturday.
Chicken a la Kiev/Kyiv (called Chicken Kiev in the West) is made of a chicken fillet pounded and rolled around cold butter and then fried in a coating of bread crumbs.
Some of the food brands and restaurants in the West are rebranding Chicken Kiev as Chicken Kyiv. The change is a show of solidarity with the people of Ukraine, who are now fighting a Russian invasion.
The Ukrainian capital was known as Kiev (pronounced key-ev) under Soviet rule but Ukrainians call their city Kyiv (pronounced kee-yeev).
Western media houses, such as BBC and The New York Times, have switched to Kyiv in their coverage.
This newspaper sought Kothari’s opinion on the “Kiev-to-Kyiv shift”. Kothari said it was up to the people of a place to decide on any name they wanted.
“If a place wants its name changed officially, then change it. Calcutta, for example, has become Kolkata…. But Calcutta Club has not become Kolkata Club. In Mocambo, Chicken A La Kiev has been there since the inception of the restaurant. Any tweak now will amount to a shift from that long-treasured heritage,” he said.
The origin of Chicken Kiev, which became widely popular in the West in the 1970s, is shrouded in mystery. The Russians have always claimed the dish as their own but some sceptics have suggested a French connection.
According to multiple media reports, it was served at a May 1990 dinner at the Soviet embassy in Washington DC to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
There is, however, no room for any doubts on how the dish made it to Kolkata.
Mocambo was started by Nitin Kothari’s father, Shivji Kothari, in 1956. An Italian chef called Antonio Prandhe was brought to Calcutta exclusively for Mocambo. An expert in making a variety of European dishes, Prandhe introduced to the Mocambo menu dishes like lasagne, spaghetti with meatballs from Italy, fish meunière from France and chicken stroganoff and a la Kiev from Russia.
“Mocambo started barely nine years after Independence. Calcutta's palate was still largely influenced by the flavours of the Raj — cutlets, fish and chips and a variety of pies. My father wanted to bring European food to Kolkata's table,” said Kothari.
The dish has achieved legendary status and is yet another testament to the cosmopolitan nature of Kolkata’s palate.
The list of admirers of the dish has also kept growing. Kothari remembers how Siddhartha Shankar Ray, former chief minister of Bengal, and his wife Maya Ray would drop in "late at night and sit at a corner table" to savour the dish.
Amitabh Bachchan also used to love it, said Kothari.
Several Bollywood actors from the current generation also drop in for the delicacy when they are in town, he said.
Several other restaurants on Park Street also started serving the dish. The generous dollop of butter that oozes into the plate the moment a knife cuts through the coating is filmed, and posted, on food lovers' groups on a regular basis.
“Chicken a la Kiev is a cult dish that has stood the test of time. My personal opinion is that the name should be best left unchanged. Solidarity can be shown in different ways,” said Indrajit Lahiri, a food vlogger.
“But as a generic consumer, I am fine with any name as long as the taste remains the same,” he said.