NEW DELHI: There’s a bit of Paris in the capital — the aroma of freshly baked goodies is wafting out of the local boulangerie, not only on the tony streets, but also in middle-class Delhi. Today’s neighbourhood hangout is the French-style bakery-café with its fresh confections, artisanal breads and cookies, European snacks, fresh juices, fragrant coffees and iced teas.
Perhaps the city was ready for these cosy, less stuffy eating places. A city as buzzing as Delhi needed somewhere for people to go for a relaxed breakfast, to meet during office hours for coffee and quiche and enjoy a dessert fresh out of the oven after dinner, said Harshi Daswani, who has started Tete-A-Tete Café and Patisserie in south Delhi.
“My concept was a homely neighbourhood café and a one-stop shop for snacks,” revealed Aaavika Chhawchharia of Honey & Dough. The newly minted food entrepreneur has since seen people heading to her cafés at Defence Colony, Safdarjung Development Area and Dwarka for oven-fresh breakfast with coffee in the morning, lawyers discussing work over snacks and families converging for pastries and coffee after dinner.
Shriram Monga of SRED, a food and beverage advisory firm, believes the mushrooming of bakery-cafes is a testament to Delhi’s evolving palate, with boulangeries taking up the space held traditionally by coffee shops. “A bakery is a high margin business because operators have control over the inventory, and this has helped changed the dessert options for Indians,” Monga explained. “If an eatery offers top-notch bakery options alongside good food and beverages and is at a good location, then it is bound to attract food lovers.”
Not surprisingly, residential areas such as Mayur Vihar, Punjabi Bagh, Rajouri Garden and Janakpuri have seen many of these bakery-cafes opening up in the colonies there. Given the Western tilt of their fare, they bear similarly non-Indian names such as Honey & Dough, Binge, Tete-a-Tete, BakeAmor, Sugar Loft, Backkerei and Bake Me a Cake. There is even a vanilla-named Coffee House in Majnu ka Tilla.
Most of the young entrepreneurs who are spearheading this change are passionate bakers rather than professional hoteliers. Daswani started Tete-A-Tete after undertaking a certification course in baking from Manchester, England. She knew the capital could do with a French-style boulangerie, and as things would have it, she came in touch with serial restaurateur Vidur Kanodia of Eatbud Food. Kanodia taste Daswani’s delectable bakes and was impressed enough to help turn her hobby into a business.
For Kanodia, who runs 14 restaurants in Delhi, it was a first foray into the bakery segment. “People in the age group of 20–35 years have an evolved taste palate and they look for good confectionary and snacks options,” the experienced businessman said. All he needed to operate a remunerative place, he said, was a good location.
The low cost — a boulangerie requires space for a bakery, seating for 10-12 people, not too elaborate a menu and minimal décor — allows owners to experiment with the business concept. Chhawchharia of Honey & Dough opted for a neighbourhood-friendly pit-stop for cookies, fresh bread and desserts, far removed from the impersonal world of petrochemicals and polymers that her business family lived in.
Kundan Ganguly achieved both his childhood dream of running a café and offering customers “real baked products prepared without using premixes and too much artificial flavours” when he partnered two friends in starting BakeAmor. His 12-seat establishment is, as he himself describes, a “charming and homely joint” selling quiche, calzone, cookies and customised bread. Ganguly’s father ran the Koena Bakery for 30 years in Jharkhand and the son hoped to do something similar in Delhi. Only, it wasn’t just a plain old bakery that the junior ended up with. The time was ripe for ushering the spirit of France in the capital.
