Nakur

Girish Chandra Dey & Nakur Chandra Nandy's sweet shop in north Kolkata, popularly known as "Nakur", is probably the most famous destination in Kolkata for sweet lovers. It has been selling sweets for more than hundred and fifty years and has played an active part in the evolution of "sandesh", a typical sweet made from "chhana" or fresh curd cheese. "Sandesh" has evolved with time and there are hundreds of varieties being sold from sweet shops all over Bengal. The biggest player in this industry is still "Nakur" which is located inside a narrow age-old alley in "Simla para" near Hedua park. For GPS lovers, the actual address is 56, Ramdulal Sarkar Street, Kolkata-700006.

Girish Chandra Dey, who learnt the art of making sweets from his father Mahesh Chandra Dey, was the person who first made this sweet shop popular. He made innovative new sweets which did all the magic and attracted people with a "sweet tooth". He made Nakur Chandra Nandy, his son-in-law, a partner and since then the shop has been known by it's current name. Colloquially people use to call it "Nokur".

                                             

This shop first came up with the innovative "white chocolate sandesh" made from milk chocolate and "dark chocolate sandesh" made from dark chocolate. Strawberry and blackcurrant flavoured sweets are surely going to be a heavenly treat for your taste buds. People love this shop for the endless variety of signature items like 'jolbhara', 'aam sandesh', 'monopuli', 'malai roll', 'sarpuria', 'parijaat', 'kachagolla', 'monohara', etc which are surely going to make you start loving the Bengali sweets . During festivals like "Bhaifota" or "Jamai shashthhi", the queue of customers is longer than you can ever imagine. The owners are so committed to the customers that they keep the shop open till 1:00 at night on these days.

It is known that Swami Vivekananda used to visit the shop regularly in his early life. Since then, the supreme quality of the sweets have been maintained by the proprietors and the sweet-makers for ages. The demand has always been rising and the shop has been able to attract famous personalities like film directors Satyajit Ray and Rituporno Ghosh, actor Shahrukh Khan, cricketer MS Dhoni, just to name a few. Even the legendary actor Amitabh Bachhan relied on this sweet shop for his son Abhishek's marriage with Aishwarya, winner of the Miss World pageant of 1994. Nakur was also given the responsibility to prepare the congratulatory "sandesh cake" for the team Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) to celebrate their victory in Indian Premier League 2012.