Cafe Italiano, Chandrasekharpur

Sailen Routray

The office of Bhubaneswar Development Authority (BDA), 2022
Photo Credit: commons.wikimedia.org/Subhra Singh

My family came to Bhubaneswar in 1987. I left it for Bombay in 2002 to pursue a master’s degree. At that time, Bhubaneswar was an agglomeration of towns and as a city it had no character of its own, unlike say Puri or Cuttack. But it was, for me, a city of street food.

One of the first places that Sidharth ‘showed’ me (after I shifted back to Bhubaneswar from Bangalore in 2013–14) as a part of his city was Cafe Italiano, where you could get a cup of cappuccino for thirty rupees and hang around for an hour.

The roof of the cafe was made of bamboo mats and its sitting area designed tastefully with cane chairs and tables of wood and tyres. Located in Chandrasekharpur and situated on the longest arterial road that joins Bhubaneswar to Cuttack, Cafe Italiano soon became a hangout for me and my friends, where we would often meet for sandwiches and coffee. I got married around the time and sometimes the wife and I would meet up with Sidharth and his girlfriend (who was studying English literature in college like him) there.

Till the age of sixteen, in 1996, I do not remember we as a family ever going out to eat. Even at home, eating together was not a rule as a family. Everybody ate when they felt like it, including Ma, who never waited for Baba. The only time we would eat out together as a family was when traveling to Balabhadrapur, our village in Cuttack district.

Of course buying fried snacks for the ‘afternoon tiffin’ was an indulgence a few times a month. But one bought the bara, singida and piaji and got it home. This was the culture in Bhubaneswar in most families. By the time I started going to college, I had very little pocket money. My gang in college would often eat out, but it was mostly street food. The occasional ‘treat’ would be at Venus Inn (a south Indian restaurant) or at Keyar’s (a multi-cuisine restaurant, the chief attraction of which was an ‘American Chopsuey’), both located in Bapuji Nagar, not very far from college. Since we as a family never ate out together, I had no clue about the options near our home in Chandrasekharpur in north Bhubaneswar.

Since the 1990s, it is Chandrasekharpur that has seen the most amount of concentrated development involving real estate, IT companies and private educational institutions. Bhubaneswar acts as a hatchery for migratory birds from all over the state—the eggs hatch and the chicks soon fly away. People come for government jobs from across the state. Their children go to school and college here and then move out for jobs elsewhere. 

This is especially true of Chandrasekharpur as a locality within the city. A large part of the population under the age of thirty-five consists of migrants. This segment has access to disposable incomes not seen earlier or in other parts of the city. This has meant a mushrooming of cafes, pizzerias and restaurants that specifically cater to this population. Cafe Italiano, started by Ranjan, is one such place.

The cafe has a cult following with a Facebook page maintained by fans. But more often than not, these fans are people no longer in Bhubaneswar. A large number of them moved to cities like Bangalore, Delhi, Hyderabad or Pune after completing their studies or because Bhubaneswar no longer had a job that they found fulfilling. 

Sidharth also moved out after graduation in 2016 to Pondicherry to pursue a master’s degree. His body moved back in February 2017. I never wanted him to leave. The marriage between his Bhubaneswar and my Bhubaneswar was never consummated, Cafe Italiano notwithstanding. For me, his ghost still haunts the place, whenever the wife and I go there. It is a place suffused not with nostalgia but with what Russians call toska—a longing with nothing to long for.

Note: This piece was first published in the blog Chiragh Dilli as a part of the piece titled "This City, Other Cities" on April 6, 2018. Care Italiano shut shop a few years back.