No ingredient premixes. No ready-made recipes. Simple but elegant stuffs handcrafted in small batches. That is what Chantilly Café is all about. Manoj John reviews the new happening place in downtown Mumbai.
I always had a desire to set up a quaint little place, warm and cozy, where I can serve fresh-ground coffee, home-style cakes, real waffles and chunky chocolate chip cookies. Only God knows they’re hard to come by in our city!”
This desire of US-trained Needa Khan led her to open a boutique café in Mumbai. Chantilly Café is now a bustling place in Bandra even as it does not have a defined customer profile.
Chantilly caters to all segments—from school-going students to adult friends, from love-struck youngsters to busy working professionals. Families in the neighbourhood walk in to the café post-dinner to catch up with one another over dessert and coffee. There are customers of all age-groups.
Their preferences do differ. And there is something for everyone. The younger ones lean towards chocolate-loaded desserts while the older ones go for more subtle flavours of cheese cake and roasted almond cake.
“It was never intended to cater to only a certain audience. Anyone who enjoys eating is welcome to Chantilly!,” says Khan.
The word Chantilly has many meanings. It is a town in northern France. It also means scalloped silk. Whipped dessert topping is also called Chantilly. True to its name, Chantilly Café too means many things to many people.
Made from scratches
Packaged premixes are a no-no in Chantilly’s kitchen. “Simple stuff, handcrafted in small batches, and most importantly, made from the scratches,” Khan describes her products. Chantilly’s kitchen is a rare sight in the contemporary bakery industry where premixes rule the roost. Everything in the kitchen is made in-house with real butter and without preservatives.
“Products are baked fresh every single day because that’s how I always imagined it to be. If I am sold out for the day, I am sold out. If I make 50 cookies today, I cannot serve the 51st until tomorrow. Actually I’d rather not. For me, it is either a fresh-baked product or nothing at all. Small batches, done daily,” she explains. Khan believes that downright passion is not an easy road to travel, but it is worth the attempt. Khan has been baking since school. She requested her parents to buy her an oven when still at school.
Her mother was a fabulous cook, although she never tried her hand at baking. She wondered where her daughter got her flair for baking from.
Khan studied science till the 12th grade and then decided to pursue hotel management. Her goal at that time was to work at a five-star pastry kitchen. She did her hotel management from Rizvi HMCT and her internship and training from Trident.
She soon left for Chicago to do a diploma course in pastry. She interned there in local bakeries to learn the ropes of the business at the start-up level.
“Five-star hotel kitchens and small, local pastry kitchens are two different worlds. In five-stars, you definitely learn a lot of skills but you’re spared from the other apparently boring yet crucial things such as inventory control and purchase. That is good in one way since you can completely focus on honing your skills, but if you want to run a business, the ‘boring’ details are just as important. Your expenses determine your profits. So cost-control, inventory and staff-management play a decisive part of a business,” says Khan.
When working at Trident, she realised she wanted to do something of her own. “Having a kitchen of my own gives me the freedom to create something to the best of my ability. Baking, as any true baker knows, is as much a science as it is an art. For me, if you understand the chemistry of it, you can build recipes in any way you like,” she says.
No outside recipe
Chantilly never uses recipes created by others or taken from the internet. All recipes are written by Khan herself. “I see the end product and decide if any changes are needed. If you understand what each ingredient, technique and the time impart to a recipe, baking is second nature to you,” she says.
Khan is always on her toes to learn new techniques and implement them in her kitchen. She intends to attend workshops at the soon-to-be-opened School of European Pastry in Mumbai, set up by chefs Anil Rohira and Vikas Bagul, who was her mentor at Trident. “I am sure the courses designed by them will be splendid. “I believe there is always something to learn, no matter how old you are,” she says.
Chantilly is a small café. The kitchen being on-site, the production space is smaller. Setting up the kitchen was a real challenge and partly the reason why Khan had to streamline her menu. She introduced only a few of her signature products. She believes that it is better to do five things wellthan do ten things haphazardly.
Chantilly is now planning to acquire a central kitchen so that it can increase its product range and introduce new savoury products.
The café doles out two kinds of waffles—the Belgian waffle and the Liege waffle. Both of these are clubbed under “waffles,” but they couldn’t be more different from each other. The Belgian waffle goes with any topping you desire, while the Liege is more selective of its partners. It works better with fruit, cinnamon, caramel and cream toppings.
The Belgian waffle is fluffy on the inside and crisp on the outside, while the Liege waffle is wonderfully soft, dense and buttery, interspersed with caramelised bits of Belgian Pearl Sugar. The Liege waffle batter takes about two days to make, and so Khan pre-schedules the product batches.
Chantilly’s customers treasure Chunky Chocolate Chip Cookies, Baked Philadelphia Cheesecake, Roasted Almond Cake, Gooey Brownie and Hot Chocolate. It also has a range of specialty coffees, which include Nutella Cream Latte, French Vanilla Latte and Mocha Cream Latte. Sourcing challenges
“I do not compromise on the quality of ingredients I use. For instance, I insist on using only Philadelphia cream cheese for my cheesecake, and real almond flour instead of almond extract in my Roasted Almond Cake, says Needa. Customers often make comments as to how they can taste the “real butter” in the dessert. Chantilly has priced its products competitively despite using such top quality ingredients.
Khan knows that sourcing quality raw materials is quite a task. Belgian Pearl Sugar, Philapdelphia cream cheese and Nutella are challenging to source. It is not because they are in short supply but because their prices fluctuate massively as there are no official distributors in India. This is a major reason for concern as the price inflations directly affect product costing.
At Chantilly, every employee is handheld to master the techniques so that one is able to cover for another if need be. “If you yourself do not know how to do something correctly, you won’t possibly know when someone else does it the wrong way. That is why it is important for everyone in the kitchen to learn how things are done correctly,” says Khan. That is a markedly different way of grooming the employees.
Khan is a food blogger. On Instagram, she masquerades as @FoodBossIndia. She uses social media for marketing and branding as she feels it is the most reliable way to reach out to the people and definitely generates the most organic audience and footfall.
