This conceptual café explores the Babu culture of old Calcutta, the world of mansion drawing rooms, gramophone evenings, adda over tea and an easy, cultivated leisure, and translates it into a contemporary cafeteria.
A warm mustard-yellow envelope, a black-and-white checkerboard floor and a dark timber beamed ceiling set the base palette. Arched niches finished in textured terracotta plaster run along the walls, each spot-lit to display a fragment of the era: a gramophone and vinyl, a hookah, a walking stick, a chess set, books and vintage letter boxes.
The entrance corridor opens with a gallery wall of antique gilded frames, a rotary telephone and a carved timber mirror, while stained-glass fanlights recall the coloured windows of old Kolkata homes. Inside, a collage of old Calcutta photographs and a full-length Bengal folk-style mural turn the dining hall into a place where guests eat and talk surrounded by the city's memory.
