‘I want people to associate my food with gluttony’

Chef Aarudhra Giri on why she doesn’t think gluttony is a sin and the opening of her new café

August 17, 2018 02:53 pm | Updated 02:53 pm IST

Chef Aarudhra Giri at Cafe Gluttony

Chef Aarudhra Giri at Cafe Gluttony

It was the name that caught my attention at The Gourmet Bazaar in 2016. Café Gluttony! At that point, Chef Aarudhra Giri was only taking orders on her sauces, jams and chutneys. She operated from a small kitchen in Hotel Alankar Ram Nagar. Now she’s ready with a proper café — still named Gluttony — on the hotel’s premises.

Light and greenery fill the cafe

Light and greenery fill the cafe

The first impression of the café is of light, colour and greenery. The space is quite small but the ambience is cheery. Aarudhra says she’d always wanted to start a café but waited till she knew where she would settle. “I didn’t want to open one here and then end up moving somewhere else.” So The Gourmet Bazaar experience was more about testing her wings. “I took over the pastry kitchen at Hotel Alankar in 2015 and trained the chefs to make desserts and breads. It would have been difficult to set up an entire kitchen; this way I was optimising the existing infrastructure,” she says.

Her entry into this field was happen-stance. After a degree in commerce, she was looking to do an MBA in marketing. A chance remark by her brother changed her course. “He said, ‘You love cooking and baking. Why don’t you do something with that?’ I began to look online for culinary courses and finally signed up for a pastry and baking arts course at the Institute of Culinary Education, New York. My only thought then was that it’s only a year and I can manage that even if I don’t like it,” she recalls. But she loved the experience and hasn’t gone back to marketing.

Gourmet Style Burgers

Gourmet Style Burgers

At Café Gluttony, she will offer not just desserts and cakes but also burgers, sandwiches, salads, pastas and coffee. “The menu is simple and straightforward. We have lamb burger with caramelised onions, chicken burger with smoked pepper and a paneer steak burger. The burgers will be gourmet style.” She’s proud of her coffee. “It’s single-origin coffee sourced from Chikmagalur and a family estate in Valparai. The beans are roasted here,” she smiles. Apart from the cakes, she plans to have two or three plated desserts that will change once in two weeks depending on how things go.

For those with a sweet tooth

For those with a sweet tooth

Given her focus on desserts, how does she deal with sugar getting such bad press? She admits it’s a challenge. “But I believe, like the French, that one should not leave anything. Eat everything in small portions.” That said, she makes zero-calorie sugar or coconut blossom sugar on request. “But that’s only for orders,” she clarifies.

The orders are also responsible for her menu development. “Someone wanted an orange and chocolate cake,” she says. “It turned out well so I added it to my menu. That’s how my cake menu grew.” Everything is customisable, she assures me. For the rest, she sends out samples to her regular customer base and her friends and asks for feedback. But her biggest critic is her brother, who does not hesitate to tell her that “some stuff is rubbish”.

Chocolate and caramel cake

Chocolate and caramel cake

Aarudhra has plans of expansion, which is why she has an as-simple-as-possible menu. “It will help scaling up when it happens,” she muses. “Whether it is here or in some other city.” She is also open to the idea of a franchisee, she says. She would like to identify interested people, offer them the training and technical know-how, help set them up and then stick to frequent visits for quality control. “Smaller kitchens are better than a single central kitchen,” she says earnestly. “The food will be fresher and the possibility of damage is less.”

Finally I ask about the name. After all, gluttony is one of the seven sins. Aarudhra laughs and says she doesn’t think so. “I want people to associate my food with gluttony.”

When things get difficult

I work out of a small kitchen so layered cakes are problematic. I had a 10kg order once and we’d struggled to finish it. It had come out quite well but the client forgot to put it in the fridge. It started to melt in the heat. Finally I had to go to the venue at night and assemble it just before they cut it. Technically, soufflés are the most difficult thing to make. And the easiest are cookies.

Café Gluttony was launched on August 17 at Hotel Alankar, Sivasamy Salai, Ram Nagar. It will be open from 12.00 noon to 11.00 pm every day. Contact 9994310024 for details

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