It is rare to find two eateries open within days of each other, and rarer to see them adopt a holistic approach by using healthy eating as the reason to overhaul their menus and supply chains. Both also seem trend driven and of the moment.
Kitchen Garden, the new urban café from the folks behind Suzette, translates healthy eating into an expansive salad bar and a menu that uses 90 per cent organic produce to prepare salads, smoothies and sandwiches.
212 All Good, a new clean eating restaurant at Phoenix Mills, takes a different tack. Here you can get a cocktail, a snack or a meal made of ingredients sourced locally. There are also substitutes for everything from cola to ketchup.
The motivation
Jeremie Sabaggh, one of the three partners behind the Kitchen Garden, says, “We wanted to do something like a Subway, but with good ingredients.” Romil Ratra, Group Director, Bellona Hospitality, says the impetus for 212 All Good was “people realising there are huge benefits in eating the right stuff without compromising the meal experience. Without saying, ‘I can’t eat this.’ Fried is not bad. Cheese is not bad. It is like, alcohol is not bad. How do we make it better so that there’s less guilt at the end of everything?”
The original idea for 212 All Good came from Deepti Dadlani, who heads marketing at Bellona. She says, “There’s this whole other conversation where you can say what you eat is how you feel, and what you are.”
The scale of the undertaking can’t be experienced in a single dish, though the Andaman Island Tuna Poke Bowl gives you a fair idea of the complexities involved: from sourcing and transporting fish from the Andamans to substituting traditional rice for red rice, to serving it with lightly fermented carrots. Seven months of intensive research have gone into formulating recipes for everything from soda to bread.
The same can be said of the devotion put into sourcing the produce at Kitchen Garden. The crockery has been brought from Vietnam the bread is as a crusty sourdough is airy and moist (the breads are organic). The kitchen turns out only 20 loaves a day, though that is set to expand. Also on the menu is ciabatta bread, though not the flaky croissants that are available at Suzette. This is in keeping with the healthy focus of Kitchen Garden, where even the bread is made from three ingredients: wheat and rye flour, salt and water.
Sabaggh says, “I started attending bread classes in France in 2012, working on baguettes and everything like croissants for Suzette. And then I did some internships in Paris.” This led to a second internship in Paris with a baker who “is totally crazy guy, very passionate and working only with sourdough.” It’s this tutelage that has led to the sourdough that is served at the restaurant.
Ratra and Sabaggh are committed to the quality of their product. Sabaggh says, “With Kitchen Garden, the idea is to do something more urban, maybe a bit more young. More international, less French. Where we can do something like soba noodles, that we are doing here, or ciabatta breads or twisted hummus or have some edamame, or veggies, which were not exactly, fitting our Suzette concept.”
That said, there are some things from Suzette that they’re carrying over. “The reason why we kept the ‘by Suzette’ [label] is that we want people to know that this is the same way of making things, always from scratch, using organic products, never using shortcuts to make food, no artificial flavours, no ready-made stuff. We don’t have ready-made stuff, I don’t like that.”
Good for your gut
The focus of the food at 212 All Good is that it should be good for your gut. The team has worked on fermentation of vegetables as well as things like kefir, a fermented milk drink made with yeast. Tacos, all-day breakfast, salads are available for a dining experience that is similar to the one you would have at any of the mall’s other eateries, but with ingredients that are free from preservatives.
Both restaurants work with suppliers to bring farm fresh ingredients to their customers. At Kitchen Garden, cherry tomatoes to cheeses are supplied from a farm in Gujarat. The vegetables, grains and meats are brought from farmers in Maharashtra and close by. If it is not possible to get quality ingredients locally, for example Haas avocados, Parmesan cheese, it’s imported.
At 212 All Good, everything is sourced locally, be it cheese, fish or vegetables. Salmon was dropped from the menu as it could not be sourced from the country. Behind the bar, tetrapacks of juice have been banished in favour of freshly squeezed juices and even bitters are being made in-house.
If this signals anything, it is that city consumers are looking to eat out, but not at the expense of their health. Sabaggh sums it up, “What we discovered also from clients in Mumbai is that people really know what they want, and they like to experiment.”
Both restaurants offer something for everyone: catering to diets that range from vegan to keto to gluten free. And perhaps more innovatively, to those that aren’t on a diet; rather just choosing to watch what they eat.
The author is a freelance writer
To make a reservation at Kitchen Garden, Bandra West; Call 26459775
212 All Good opens on October 17 at High Street Phoenix; Call 62216020/ 8655012212
