Taking the slow lane in Mysuru

Amaresh Subramaniam, 41, founder of Vui Coffee Roasters, jots the temperature of a batch of coffee beans every half a minute for 13 minutes in a small notebook. “Great coffee is high attention work,” he says.

Prathvi Agarwal, 32, in his solo-run bakery, Khameeri Sourdough Microbakery, says you must knead sourdough until “you become one with the dough”.

Prathiksha Prahallad, 27, of Leaven café is deeply influenced by the Kannada recipes from a baking certification her grandmother acquired over six decades ago. Getting it right matters so much, she’s even eaten scraps off a plate that a customer hadn’t finished to test if something was wrong with it.

In the post covid-19 pandemic years, Mysuru has seen a new bakes and brews culture, brought about by patissiers, baristas, chefs, and roast-masters for whom the process is individualistic, creative and skill-based. It is also deeply personal. As the world speeds up and scales up, Mysuru is slowing it all down and doing it by hand. Whether it’s coffee, cocoa or bread, slow process skills have value here.

Mysuru is a uniquely multi-cultural microcosm. Yoga centres attract a multi-cultural foreign crowd, who along with the visiting Indians from other cities keep the market for a variety of food vibrant. The Bengaluru tech brewery-hopping crowd comes to Mysuru, three hours away by the new expressway, to café-hop. From Madikeri come coffee planters, Tibetans, and tourists dropping into the nearest city.

This floating population is not always loyal, but Mysuru has always been a retirement-friendly city. Dina Weber, 31, founder of bakery SAPA, points out that many of her initial customers included repatriates from overseas who missed good breads. Thus, here, the local anchors the culture as opposed to a Goan or Himachali hot spot, which is about the romance of influx and transience.

As in R.K. Narayan’s books, the Mysurean is a character whose quirks are known intimately, not fleetingly. Mysuru becomes a crucible for the kind of knowing that takes care and attention. Indira Chandrasekhar, author and editor of Out of Print journal, grew up in the Mysuru of the 1960s and 1970s, when her father was a professor. “Culturally, one didn’t eat out. The idea of getting into a car and going to the centre of Mysuru to eat a meal didn’t enter my parents’ psychology,” she says. There was Champakali, a sweet shop run by Dasaprakash hotel on Sayyaji Rao Road, which passed for a café.

Mysuru has always been a dreamy locale for filmmakers, given its lush greenery and the royal backdrops of seven palaces, including the current residence of the erstwhile Wodeyar royal family, Amba Vilas Palace, the accompanying landscaped gardens and not to mention the Indo-Saracenic and Art Deco architectural features of the city’s quaint neighbourhoods. Legendary Kannada actor Rajkumar was the last to shoot inside the Amba Vilas palace for Mayura in the 1970s. However, a palace floor tile was cracked in the shoot and all subsequent filming was stopped by the palace board. Rajinikanth, whose 1990s hits Padayappa (1999) and Muthu (1995) were shot in Mysuru, has long considered the city lucky for him and drew crowds while shooting here for Jailer-2 in 2025. Mysurean director S.V. Rajendra Singh Babu (best known for the National-award winning Bandhana, 1984) has called the city “200 different locations within 20km”.

Yet, abhorrent of hang-out culture, and small enough for everyone to know everyone, the close-knit circles are now contending with an evolving social landscape. “Mysuru has always had an intellectual drift thanks to the patronage of the palace, a steady integrity to it,” Chandrasekhar says.

Visibility is not generally prized here; quietude and an immersive practice is. Thus, engagement tends to be more conversational, learning-oriented, and serious, which inspires drop-ins and meetings at a talk, or at each other’s houses. A classical musician, a yogi and an academic are more likely to be courted here.

The only bit of celeb-spotting done is on the Instagram handle of Sandhya’s House, a notable baale ellai oota (banana leaf meal) cuisine spot at a 125-year-old home in Krishnamurthypuram, which is now frequented by everyone from the parents of former British prime minister Rishi Sunak to politician Tejasvi Surya, director Adoor Gopalakrishnan, cricketer Javagal Srinath, and visiting international corporate teams.

Mysuru has always had a culture of great connection, but is seemingly hesitant to locate it in an accessible space. Mysuru is cherished deeply by locals who tend to close ranks. In his 1939 travelogue Mysore, Narayan writes, “As in ancient Athens, people settle many matters of philosophy, politics and personal affairs, while promenading around the statue or strolling down Sayyaji Rao Road. But this creates certain traffic problems, as such discussions, by preference, are held on road junctions, rather than on the very broad footpaths (which, for mysterious reasons, are detested and avoided by one and all).” Narayan lived here and wrote several of its residents, his friends, into his books, for over 50 years.

“The café scene belongs to an evolving generation that requires a different kind of money, engagement, that is stepping away from corporate madness in search of meaning,” Chandrasekhar notes. “One doesn’t want to live in nostalgia, but one has to recognise the transitions that are happening because something integral is being eroded.”

In a flowering to inclusiveness, these new cafes become accommodating spaces where the past and the present, the old and the new Mysuru may sit at a table and mingle. Mysuru is one of the last bastions of the slow life and as it evolves, it is holding on to a unique essence of itself.

KEEPING IT QUIET

The new cafés and bakeries are externalising Mysuru’s slowness. Most are small, functional, have greenery within and without, and are set in quiet and quaint old neighbourhoods dotting Gokulam, Vontikoppal and Yadavgiri. They are non-intimidating. You sit outdoors, alone or hang out, read, work, think. They have the floor space to accommodate more tables, but as Qinwan Ali, 41, co-founder of Sihi, a café set in an Art Deco bungalow, explains, they keep it free to retain a sense of expansiveness and allow children to run around.

“It’s not that Mysuru has changed,” says Nikhilesh M.M., 37, founder of Aane café, who also says he will not add more tables though he has the space. “It is that Mysuru has not and will not.”

Geographically, Mysuru is green, has minimal pollution, is surrounded by dense wildlife reserves, is a planned town with parks in each block, and wide walkable avenues. It is also centrally accessible to several coffee and cacao-growing regions such as Kodagu (Coorg), Chikkamagaluru, Sakleshpur and Bababudangiri in Karnataka, Wayanad and Idukki in Kerala, and the Nilgiris in Tamil Nadu, which makes good supply easy. Estate coffee and craft chocolate festivals are on the rise, and Nikhilesh says it’s not uncommon to have small estate owners drop into cafés and offer samples and suggest collaborations.

“When Blue Tokai came in 10 years ago they changed the market for coffee,” says Tejesh Koppera, 29. After an economics degree from Symbiosis college, Pune, he apprenticed with the three-Michelin starred L’Auberge de l’Ile Barbe in Alsace, France, in early 2019 and sought out Naviluna café in Mysuru to work as a chocolate maker in late 2019. He left in 2021 and set up Loco, a chocolate microfactory, in 2022, operating out of a rented garage in Gokulam. He now supplies to and consults with food start-ups and businesses.

While each café may source from a different vendor, the rise of an exploratory and experimental food culture has also matured Mysuru’s palate. “Mysuru is a discerning market, people know what good coffee and chocolate tastes like, can distinguish between organic and processed, so if the product is good, it will do well. Even my first batch sold out,” Koppera says.

Word of mouth is strong. Agarwal moved from baking and selling from home by pre-orders for a year to setting up his shop in December 2025. He is only open from Thursday to Sunday, and invariably sells out. Originally from Delhi, he says he could get higher footfall in a larger city, but the overheads would be higher.

“In Mysuru people want to know the process, the ingredients, how organic everything is, ask questions and savour the product knowledgeably,” says Sujay Shivapooja, who is married to Prahallad and handles the brews at the one-year-old Leaven. “They’re not picking up a bite on the way to somewhere else. They’re savouring the bite. This translates to a willingness to pay higher prices for better products.” Their third partner, Kedar Ram, 31, is a Cordon Bleu trained chef, who returned from Australia to help them focus on building up the menu.

KIND CONSUMPTION

There is a pervasive joy of experimentation, a curiosity, on both sides of the counter. It is not uncommon to see young creators set up a small stall on popular street corners or outside a park or lake entrance to sell homemade cupcakes, cheesecakes, breads, cookies, unique brews, or fermented beverages. This becomes a test ground for many small food businesses that then go on to set up brick and mortar establishments.

Naviluna, a craft chocolaterie, was set up by David Belo from South Africa in 2012. In 2016, Weber, a German national, began to bake from home for friends and built a growing client base by 2019. By 2020, she had moved into a tiny counter room-only space on Kalidasa Road. She was self-trained but found Mysuru to be a supportive space in which to begin. “I was greatly inspired by Minimal (Coffee Roasters), which began with low infrastructure investments in a small space,” she says.

Minimal Coffee Roasters, set up by Ashwin Shetty in 2019, still operates from a standing room-only shop in Gokulam. It was the first in the brewed coffee space. Shetty, 37, used to work in the coffee business in Dubai and had access to equipment and know-how that he found absent in Mysuru. (Mysuru has a plethora of filter coffee outlets, such as Kings & Co., Wodeyar’s Coffee, Namma Filter Coffee, and Coorg estate stand-alone outlets). He imported equipment, sourcing coffee from Chikkamagaluru, Yercaud and other estates.

Both SAPA and Minimal seemed a bit foreign to prevailing local taste. Weber worked hard to cultivate the market. She even set up a stall in the local sari market and held bake sales every Thursday and Saturday. She never explained her food, she says, not wanting to come off as condescending, but held a line between catering to tastes and cultivating it to one’s vision for the food. “Starting slow and small in a city where your rent is low, the rents of your employees are low, and of your customers are low, gives room for experimentation,” she says.

That’s Mysuru’s advantage over tier-1 cities, where you’ve got to either be wealthy or have bank or venture capital money to begin, which puts pressure on you to start showing profits and you tend to lean towards making what sells. “It’s okay to have a bad month here,” she says. That allows for organic growth in which consumer tastes grow with you.

“When we began, consumers were addicted to milky, sugary coffee. They’d get offended when we wouldn’t serve sugar with our coffees. Over time, we’ve cultivated an appreciation of black coffee, the brew and the roast,” says Shetty, who now lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand, from where he consults on and invests in coffee and cafés in Asia. It was only when popular YouTuber Kripal Amanna did a post on them that an older generation, until then filter coffee sticklers, started trooping in, Shetty says. Today, Minimal has a cult following.

Nikhilesh says when he wanted to open his café, he picked up the phone and called Shetty out of respect for his paving the way. There is a solidarity to the lineage of what is being built. Minimal has expanded to the Southern Star, a five-star venue, and now hosts “coffee raves”, that Gautam Bhaskar, who runs Ritual in the tiny space in which SAPA once began on Kalidasa Road, calls the “respectable man’s rave”. Leaven held their first collaborative sundowner in January with a mix of mocktails and alcoholic beverages at 3pm on a Saturday.

The new ventures are broader and hold the middle ground for the average joe with money but not much exposure—one who can’t pronounce “croissant” and doesn’t know what a sourdough or a medium roast is. Akin to the first-time flyer when new airports in small towns came up, these non-intimidating spaces allow one to get into the culture and mindset of a chiffon cake, a Berliner, a Korean cream cheese bun, and a tres leches. There is more openness to knowing now. “People come to the counter and tell us, we don’t know what to order, so you tell us what this is,” Shivapooja says. The cafés create a symbiosis of relying on the community as much as the community relies on them.

The muted colours and minimalist decor at Leaven were chosen so that the bakes speak without interruption. Most cafés rotate the menus weekly to afford experimentation. Khameeri maintains an inconsistent periodicity that The Local Friendly Bakery (TLFB) run by Raquel Cohanim also embraced, announcing menus only for part of the week when ready to sell, with menu and pre-orders via Instagram and WhatsApp in its early days. The sparse functionality of decor and low budget spaces convey simplicity and humility. Being slow to scale up or staff up, and being frequented by community anchors these aspects of approachability, innovation, and effort on both sides of taking the market forward.

VIBE CODED BY GEN Z

The whole front of the house team of Leaven, all in their 20s, has just returned from a day out at the Sakleshpur estate, from where their café sources beans. Among them, some are learning to serve, others are taking a break after their graduation while they figure out their direction. Chaman Naik, one of the two engineers who work as baristas here, travels to Bengaluru once a week to audition and hopes to make it in theatre and modelling. On Sundays and Wednesdays, the staff get to run their own trials, invent drinks and experiment with additions to the menu. At Vui and TLFB, a young barista service team puts out unembellished reels on Instagram, inviting customers with a vibe that has no need for script or artifice. It’s a joyous, relaxed, and self-proud vibe.

Many of these café founders have worked in the corporate world before deciding to pursue the slow life. While the rise in barista-patissier-roasting roles is a reaction against the corporate work culture, it’s not about shirking responsibility. The Mysurean café, chocolaterie and patisserie arose neither by impulse nor fantasy.

Subramaniam is a mechanical engineer from Chennai who sourced coffee in Vietnam for seven years and came to Mysuru in 2017 in search of sustainability (and began roasting in 2018). Agarwal, a CFA by qualification, worked in investment banking in Mumbai, and came to Mysuru in 2021 for Ashtanga yoga, expecting to be here initially for six months, but gained his teacher certification four years in before the sourdough passion took him. Ali, an electrical engineer, was holding down his family business in Dubai and retrained at Cordon Bleu, Bangkok at age 30. He interned with The Oberoi, Bengaluru, studied patisserie at Lavonne Academy of Baking Science and Pastry Arts, Bengaluru, where he met and collaborated with his co-founder Pooja Shridhar, 33, who has passed her civil services exam. While Prahallad trained at Lavonne too, husband Sujay did his article traineeship at PriceWaterHouse Coopers, went on to do his MBA, and worked with an angel network funding startup for two years before quitting to focus on speciality coffees. Prahallad had made cupcakes and specialised in desserts like budino and tres leches from home for many years. Both Mysureans, they’d get bakes from SAPA and coffee from Minimal when they went on dates and noticed a lacuna in the market—a space in which the two were sold together.

Versha Verma, 31 and her husband Ashwani Karoriwal, who co-run Hideaway, are both computer science engineers from Haryana. He worked with Meta in London, UK. Influenced by the annual London Coffee Festival, Verma apprenticed at local coffee shops there to train as a barista. They returned after three-and-a-half years in London in 2024 to set up the quintessential neighbourhood café in Mysuru in September of that year.

Bhaskar, who is originally from Botswana, went to the US for his MBA in 2010, and worked in tech startups there, came to Mysuru for yoga in 2022, fell in love with his now wife, and stayed. He had invested in a café while he continued to work remotely but the founder bailed out in 2022, and Bhaskar had to take it over unexpectedly.

They’ve also each invested in training themselves. Samyuktha Alwar, 26, manning her chessboard-tiled kitchen-cafe (that she set up from her savings for less than ₹2 lakh) solo at Chiffon, will be specialising in tiered wedding cakes to cater to the increasing trend of people choosing to get married in scenic Mysuru. Shivapooja wants to improve barista certifications and Prahallad is aiming for a gelataria training in Italy. Running a business is exhausting, they each find: there are no days off, no personal life, and constant staffing issues, customers are demanding, and food requires maintaining consistency and freshness in quality. So it’s not quite a shirking of the slog of corporate life, more an embracing of a personalised work ethic instead.

“This kind of work requires long attention spans and focus which are rare today. Gone are the days when young people just want any job they can get. I recruit for personality, skill I can teach,” Subramaniam says. “Gen Z is effecting a decommodification of the role, and is bringing dignity to it, by extracting identity from the skill. They’ve found a creative space to pour their identities into,” he explains. It is a process of individualisation, which perhaps is lost in the tube-lit cabins of corporate giants. Further, working with one’s hands brings a rare point of connection in a chronically online world.

Alwar says the difference between the cafés that last and those that open and shut overnight is training and discipline, which gives consistency. If it wasn’t for the pandemic, she might have migrated into a job after her patissier training. “Security doesn’t exist anywhere anymore. So a personal risk doesn’t feel like a big deal,” she adds.

Verma feels the pandemic-induced mass layoffs put the uncertainty of even corporate life on display and conveyed to employees their hard work doesn’t matter. There is no such thing as a steady job anymore, just the illusion of one for a while. Agarwal points out that often techies and those with the highest salaries work untenable hours and get into a debt trap, where they buy high-cost homes, and have to take loans for which they need to keep making high salaries to pay off. “The trade-off is just not adding up and my generation sees that wealth, growth and a sense of purpose is not going to come from a salary anymore,” he says.

Koppera saw his father work hard all his life and have nothing substantial to call his own after retirement. While he was hesitant about Koppera’s career choice, he has come around now. Bhaskar says post-pandemic, people started using their savings to experience life and live well and taking risks they earlier might not have. “The world is so unstable today. What’s the worst that can happen?” asks Verma.

OLD CITY, NEW CITY

Brunda Ganesh, 43, architect and mother of two young girls, grew up in Mysuru and has since relocated to Bengaluru. “It was in the doldrums. If you had to do or experience something ‘different’, you’d have to leave Mysuru,” she says. At best you had the Iyengar Bakery and the bhajji-bonda-churmurri guy in Gokulam and a place called Tootsie in Yadavgiri for burgers and pizzas that came with a lot of mayonnaise. She sees the change as social media driven.

“We never went to sit in a café because we didn’t need to. We pooled whatever little cash we had and bought stuff like peanuts or popcorn off handcarts and biked, walked, went to a local park or the terrace of one of our houses. Whether you were from a wealthy family or not, you didn’t need money, planning, or documentation to hang out,” she says.

The gentrification of Mysuru is a reflection of the changing utility of public spaces, Ganesh notes. Mysuru’s parks are well-kept, well-lit, and safe. The transition from single homes with gardens and terraces to apartments with tiny balconies is also indicative of how homes are changing. “Homes are getting smaller and people are in each other’s spaces.”

Most cafés claim to have broken even a few months in. Business is good and expansion offers come in, but most don’t want to scale in a hurry. “We don’t want footfalls, we want regulars,” Verma says.

Nikhilesh finds that no one wants to sit in a cafe that is filled with noise and chatter. That is not the Mysuru way. You want space and chill. So mindless upscaling goes against the vibe these cafes are working towards. He does have plans for Aane, named for the iconic elephants in the Dassara parade, though. Nikhilesh is considering merchandising and expansion, hoping to make the brand instantly recognisable at airports, and believes Mysuru has the potential to be a café-hopping hub.

Leaven seeks to expand too in considered outlets that meet a niche demand, like a gelataria and a second outlet. Bhaskar is concerned that it’s too many people doing more of the same thing and the market will get saturated; he’d like to see them collectively diversify. The cafe owners have started a group by to collaborate and exchange notes. They hope to grow together, slowly and surely. Which is, whether you’re consumer or producer, the Mysuru way.

Tara Das is a Mysuru-based therapist and author.