Amar Khamar takes the TRI community on a taste-based tour of Bengal’s crops and cupboards. Through a presentation and mini tasting menu, the chefs explore the indigenous practices and culinary histories behind five of the region’s most defining ingredients, paddy, dal, salt, sugar, and mustard, and the way these ingredients work in concert as a recipe for self-sustenance and autonomy. 

The evening moves from material to maker, tracing each ingredient across the full arc of its life: how it is grown, how it is preserved, and how it finds its way to the table. In doing so, it offers something rarer than a meal, an insight into the knowledge systems and daily practices of Bengal’s primary producers, whose relationship with the land has quietly sustained the region for generations. 

Food tells stories that history books often don’t. Set within TRI’s winter season exhibition ADDA: The Third Space, Text, Tastes and Tales of Mishti brings together a room of diners for a seven-course mini meal by Handpicked by Amrita, where Bengali mishti becomes the lens through which Kolkata’s histories, hierarchies, and cultural memory are explored and savoured. 

Woven through each course is the ethnographic research of Dr. Ishita Dey, drawn from her publication Sweet Excess: Crafting Mishti in Bengal, a work that reads recipes as archival maps, tracing stories of migration, trade, and ecology embedded within the region’s most beloved sweets. The afternoon journeys through sweet shops, homes, fairs, and festivals across Bengal, asking what mishti reveals about who we are, where we come from, and what we choose to pass on. 

If the kitchen is the heart of a home, then the bajaar is the heart of a region, where the essence of its people, produce, and palate converge. Few know this better than the chefs at Sienna, whose menus translate Bengal’s regional ingredients and traditional recipes into contemporary culinary expressions.

In this special session, Sienna steps out of their Hindustan Park home and onto the TRI Terrace to guide audiences through a sensorial journey of taste and terroir. Through five small bites, participants will experience the textures, aromas, and stories that shape the flavours of our region, discovering how the landscape itself seasons what we eat and how we experience belonging through food.