Kolkata Cricket Club

Overview

Melbourne's Crown complex has been working hard to reinvent itself right. It's removed some of its older drinking and dining hotspots, replacing them with more contemporary venues intended to attract a younger and more diverse crowd. Basically, Crown is trying to be cool.

And one damn good way to achieve this is by enlisting the help of the hugely popular Mischa Tropp (Toddy Shop) to create a new venue. And Tropp has well and truly delivered that much-needed cool factor — in spades — with his new venue Kolkata Cricket Club, which opened at the end of 2024.

The 150-seat venue is inspired by Bengali cricket clubs and members' bars, which the Indian community reclaimed following independence. You can either drop by The Sports Bar — pairing beers with snacks and thalis while watching a cricket match — or settle in for a long feed at the adjoining KCC Dining Room out back.

Food throughout the Kolkata Cricket Club has strong pan-Indian and Bengali influences but is executed with Tropp's signature contemporary twists.

Highlights have got to be Tropp's famed butter chicken, his rich goat curry, anything from the tandoor oven, and the long list of bar snacks — look no further than the samosas, beer-battered fries with curry sauce and kulchas (bread stuffed with either saffron-braised duck, or peas and stracciatella).

Kolkata Cricket Club is a banger of a venue, well worth venturing into the Crown labyrinth to find. And if this is a sign of what's to come at Crown, this old haunt might just pull off this reinvention.