At Dodā Atelier in Goa, Alvinia DeSouza slides a cup across the counter. It’s a drinking chocolate—70% dark, made from cacao she grows herself. It is nothing like the milky brown sweetness most people expect when they hear the words hot chocolate. It’s short, almost austere, with a clean bitterness at the front and a lingering floral note underneath. The cacao comes from The Happy Hermit Estate, her 10-acre farm in Bedshi, Dodamarg, on the Goa-Maharashtra border where cacao trees are grown alongside jackfruit, cashew, chikoo and love apples.
Most of us grew up on a version of hot chocolate, most commonly as a spoonful of cocoa powder stirred into warm milk. That childhood memory is exactly what a new breed of cacao bars is building on, except that the chocolate that was made of 20% cacao solids has been swapped for single-origin, mindfully sourced and creatively crafted bean-to-bar chocolate. Walk into one of the new-age cacao cafés and the menu may boast of a Hazelnut Praline Latte, a Pistachio Matcha Latte, or an Iced Tiramisu Latte, all made with speciality chocolate and crafted the way a barista makes a flat white, except the base isn’t espresso. It’s melted Indian craft chocolate.
“I always look at cacao first as an ingredient and not just as a chocolate bar,” says Vikas Temani, founder of Paul and Mike, whose beverage menu at Paul and Mike Micro Café + Store in Mumbai draws on the same fine-flavour beans behind its chocolate bars. There’s the Paul’s Secret Trinidadian Brew, a traditional recipe made by brewing regular milk and coconut milk with cocoa nibs, Jamaican pepper (allspice), bay leaf, cardamom, nutmeg and cinnamon. Then there’s the Monsoon Spiced Hot Chocolate for those who want heat with their chocolate, and purer explorations of the bean itself: a 55% Hot Chocolate for balance, and 87% for those who want to know exactly what Indian cacao tastes like in its pure form. “Historically cacao was consumed as a drink long before it was moulded into a bar, so in some ways drinking chocolate feels like going back to its roots,” says Temani.
In Hyderabad and Delhi, Manam Chocolate runs dedicated beverage bars where single-origin cacao is melted into layered iced chocolates and hot shakes, each drink tracing its beans to farmers in the West Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh. Among them are G.V.S. Prasad, whose family has grown cacao since the mid-1960s, and Boyapati Venkateswara Rao, one of the first organic cacao farmers in the district. The Delhi bar alone serves 36 cacao-based drinks, where one of the most arresting is the Orange Iced Dark Chocolate—a 60% single-origin West Godavari ganache made with fresh orange juice rather than milk, water-based and startlingly light.
In Mumbai, Subko has extended its “pod-to-bar” philosophy through The Cacao Mill, where all drinking chocolates are made with single-origin cacao sourced from Andhra Pradesh, and served with an optional house-made bruleed marshmallow on top. The Podi Hot Chocolate, a blend of 45% milk and 70% dark chocolate, is infused with a house-made red podi masala: spiced, layered and bold on the palate.
At Naviluna in Mysuru, the drinks menu is restrained by design. David Belo, who spent years powering the chocolate beverage programmes of Blue Tokai and Kafko in Bengaluru, before opening the space, has set the benchmark for the format.
What ties these spaces together is a deliberate effort to decode nostalgia. That instinct to reach back into memory while building something new runs through the kitchens of every cacao bar in this story. “I grew up in a south Indian household where every morning began with the fragrance of fresh jasmine flowers delivered to our home,” says chef Ruby Aslam, head of product and innovation at Manam. “That memory eventually inspired one of our current seasonal beverages—the Mango Jasmine Iced Chocolate, made with our 55% West Godavari chocolate and oat milk. It feels nostalgic while still offering something unexpected.”
That pivot, taking a familiar form and creating a transformed substance, is also where the vocabulary question arrives. “Cacao needs its own language,” says Rahul Reddy, co-founder of Subko. “It won’t follow the exact same path that speciality coffee did, but the trajectory is similar, developing a lexicon, a flavour wheel, a vocabulary that can travel across countries and demographics. Sugar and sweeteners are almost always part of the equation, which means drinking chocolate carries a different character than coffee. The lexicon needs to be calibrated to context like occasion, time of day, or format, rather than borrowing wholesale from coffee’s framework.”
That language, these makers argue, should begin with the ground itself. The cacao grown on DeSouza’s farm has a different character from what comes out of the river-delta soils of West Godavari. It is shaped by Goa’s iron-rich laterite soil and by the salt-carried coastal air that no inland estate can replicate. “Just as wine reflects where the grapes are grown, cacao reflects where it is grown too. Goa gives us cacao with its own character, and our job is simply to preserve and showcase that in the cup,” says DeSouza. Back at the café, the philosophy extends across the whole menu. It boasts of cacao’s various forms along with the rest of the farm’s harvest. From a lemon-drop mangosteen cooler to an addictive trail mix of cacao nibs, dried ginger and seeds.
At Belo’s café, the best-seller is a 65% hot chocolate in the Spanish tradition—short, thick, and cacao-forward. “Its charm lies firmly in the balance between dense chocolate strength whilst managing to retain a tropical lightness that is impossible to find in industrial incarnations,” he says.
Unlike coffee, whose appeal is closely tied to caffeine and which remains largely a grown-up beverage, cacao derives its lift from theobromine—a gentler, slower-acting stimulant that is well suited to younger drinkers. That broadens the audience considerably. A Malted Chocolate Shake or a Blueberry Oat Iced Chocolate can be ordered with equal enthusiasm by a 10-year-old and the parent across the table. In a country where family outings continue to shape leisure and dining habits, that makes cacao cafés uniquely positioned to appeal across generations.
Insia Lacewalla is a Goa-based food and travel writer.