Three months ago, I moved back to my hometown, Kolkata, looking forward to spending time with my grandma and practicing my Bangla. But mostly, I was excited for the food. I had been craving gobi manchurian (spicy and tangy fried cauliflower) and hot and sour soup, two of my favorite dishes.

Kolkata is the birthplace of Indian Chinese food, which traces back to Hakka Chinese traders who settled in the city in the late 1700s, when it was the capital of the British empire in India. At that time, Chinese immigrants were largely silk traders, dentists, carpenters, and leather tannery owners, and started cooking their food using local ingredients. After selling street food, they opened Indian Chinese restaurants in Tiretta Bazaar and Tangra, the two Chinatowns in Kolkata.

The cuisine is an Indian interpretation of Chinese food, which combines the deep-fried, spicy flavors Indians love with a Chinese twist, through ingredients like soy sauce and vinegar. Indian Chinese food has its own distinct flavors like Schezwan sauce (the Indian spelling of Sichuan), which uses dry red chiles (spelled “chillies” in India) as a substitute for Sichuan peppercorns. There’s also Manchurian-style cooking, where meat and vegetables are battered and fried in a spicy soy-based sauce with classic Indian ingredients like garlic, ginger, and green chiles.

Indian Chinese food has become popular all over India, especially in Mumbai, but its roots have always been in Kolkata. It’s a huge part of the culture here, so much so that many Indians believe that the food is authentically Chinese. It’s colloquially referred to as Chinese food, and is so widespread that it can be hard to distinguish its influences. “I get confused about which ingredients are Chinese versus Indian,” admits Freddy Liao, who runs the restaurant Golden Joy in Tangra with his family.