India Inc is bouncing ahead, and how. Peep into any corporate office and you can sniff it out instantly. Meeting deadlines, bottom or top whatever that may be, is the only mantra of CEOs, so much so that meals during office hours become business lunches, where the envelope is sealed. Cashing in on this new trend are Kolkata’s restaurants that have doubled up as venues where you can talk shop as well as dig into a yummy fare. Here’s a low-down.

Esplanade and Park Street are the main business hubs in Kolkata. Little surprise that most restaurants in these two areas teem with people in business suits, with blackberries perched next to their plates as they dig into their meal.

The high-end Oberoi Grand (Esplanade) and Park Hotel (Park Street) are the regular business-lunch destinations for the CEOs and MDs of most big companies. However, the small fries stick to mid-range restaurants like Peerless Inn’s Aaheli (Park Street), Sourav’s (Park Street) and Peter Cat (Park Street). For snap meets over a quick bite there is Flury’s (Park Street) or Kentucky Fried Chicken (Park Street) where one can hop into.

Aheli is a Bengali speciality restaurant where you can stick to fish dishes and Kosha Mangsho (mutton). The vegetarians would love the chhanar dalna (cottage cheese). Sourav’s and Peter Cat are multicuisine restaurants with exhaustive veg and non-veg options. But while at Peter Cat, do not miss the famed Chelo Kebab, a huge rice and kebab platter served with dollops of butter and poached eggs. All three restaurants serve alcohol so a mug of chilled beer might be the best way to wash down all the food you order.

If you are in a hurry, you’d do well to have lunch at KFC, where the waiting and serving time is as good as nil. Moreover, it doesn’t shut down after lunch at 3.30 pm like the above three and is extremely easy on the wallet. The other restaurant that doesn’t have any last-order restrictions around lunchtime is Flury’s. Flury’s serves strictly continental and European snacks all day. The stuffed omelettes here are delicious and so are the pastas.

Go on pick one, depending on what your client’s tastebuds demand and, of course, your plastic permits.