PET PUJO

The ground floor on Jagatpur Main Road is our home base in Kolkata. We are in the Aswini Nagar area, right near the Mini Market. If you walk past the market, you can't miss the smell of the cooking. We named the place PET PUJO because that’s what it’s all about—filling the stomach. It’s a small place with just enough room for the kitchen and a few people to stand or sit. The traffic on the main road is always humming in the background. We spend a lot of our time cleaning the fish or sorting through the lentils. Kolkata is a city that loves its food, so we have to keep up. The walls have a few simple pictures on them, mostly just to make it feel a bit more like home. We don't have a big staff, just a couple of us who have been doing this for years. Sometimes the rain comes down so hard that the water starts splashing near the door, and we have to put out the sandbags. The regulars come in and they don't even look at the menu anymore; they just ask what’s fresh. It’s a lot of long hours standing on our feet, but we like the bustle of Aswini Nagar. We just keep the lights on and the food ready for whoever is hungry in the neighborhood. It gets busy, but we manage. Most days we are just tired but happy.