At the buzzing Café@Jiwa in Mumbai’s trendy Bandra area, it’s all about transforming the humble roti into a health-conscious foodie’s delight. The all-roti eatery’s multi-grain wraps are stuffed with organic vegetable fillings topped 
by fresh sauces. And while you’re savouring the wraps, you can sip on healthy coolers. Café@Jiwa’s owner Raghav Gupta says his mission is to rebrand the roti — “adding a twist to a diet staple while making it healthier and giving it a more youthful appeal.”

Gupta’s one of a growing band of health-conscious entrepreneurs opening cafés and restaurants focused on providing nutritious eating options. The menus routinely offer multi-grain breads, organic vegetables and fruit juices sans added sugar and guilt-free desserts along with specialty teas and coffees — all organic of course.

In Mumbai, for instance, if you’ve got an appetite for more healthy eats, hop across to The Birdsong, a 40-seater organic café in Bandra’s Waroda Road set up by home baker Jennifer Mallick and partner Ashish Madan. Birdsong’s décor is all about casual chic with retro wooden chairs and moss-green flooring and a blackboard listing an array of delectable meals. But more than the décor, it’s the menu that’s a clear winner with its easy-on-the-waistline desserts (made with jaggery), thin-crust pizzas and wholesome sandwiches. “No maida, no refined sugar and only seasonal and organic vegetables are this health café’s mantra,” emphasises Mallick, 40.

Calcutta has its own health-conscious restaurant — Café Organica in Sunny Park near Ballygunge. With its meatless menu of multi-grain pizzas, parathas, sooji-based pastas and vegetable and fruit juices, the all-day café has caught young Calcuttans’ fancy. Says co-owner Deven Doshi: “We wanted to break the myth that healthy food is boring. Though the organic market in Calcutta is still nascent, youngsters are realising the importance of eating healthily.” 

Café Organica’s hottest sellers include chickpea salad and its thirst-quenching health drinks. Also in the business are Deven’s brother Hemen, as well as Nisheet Agarwal and Kamalika Bhattacharjee. 

Restaurateurs say a growing number of Indians are also beginning to worry about the use of artificial chemicals, fertilisers and pesticides in their meals and are turning to organic food.

It’s no surprise then that the organic-food-friendly city of Bengaluru is a big player in the health-café league. Take, for instance, Health Zingo, a 1,100sqft restaurant-cum-organic café set up by entrepreneur Deepali Bhagat that offers a combination of vegetarian meals and healthy snacks and juices. Diners like to tuck into the restaurant’s special thalis with multi-grain phulkas while other favourites include tandoori vegetable platters, tandoori tofu tikkas, low-fat tikki chaat and protein-rich multi-grain pav bhaji. Says Bhagat: “It’s for those hungry for healthy, quick-bite, fast-food options — so that one can grab a burger or dosa without feeling guilty.”

Health foods can come in all flavours and cuisines. In Delhi, investment banker-turned-organic restaurateur Mitali Kalra pumped her savings into setting up an all-Mediterranean café, Crostini, in the capital’s upmarket Hauz Khas Village. The small café, which serves raw and fresh organic food, has an open kitchen which makes the eating experience more intimate. Kalra says: “I always felt there are no healthy food options available and that all young professionals end up eating are samosas and chole-bhature to satiate their hunger pangs.”

Her own craving for healthier fare spawned a business idea: a chain of health-food cafés. So she abandoned a lucrative investment banking career in Dubai to pursue her restaurant dream. Crostini means toasted bread with toppings in Italian, but Kalra’s health café’s veg and non-veg menu goes way farther — offering wholesome fare like protein shakes, wholewheat wraps, soups and smoothies.

Meanwhile, Arpana Gvalani has opened Gostana in Mumbai, with an eye on capturing the palates of fast-food lovers. Her healthy burgers are the café’s star offerings. Gvalani describes her small restaurant as a “burger/salad café with a mission to serve healthy food in a cosy setting.”

Gvalani promises eating a Gostana burger won’t clog your arteries or enlarge your waistline. And it also features plenty of variety with 12 types of vegetarian and non-vegetarian burgers on offer accompanied by homemade sauces and fat-free mayonnaise. Besides that, Gvalani uses wheat or multi-grain bread for the buns and steams the burger patties.

These cafés are all aimed squarely at Indians who’ve become increasingly aware of the importance of nutritious eating. So, the menus emphasise the wholesome ingredients, stress how they don’t use sugar or refined maida, and declare how they curb oil use as much as possible. In fact, Mumbai’s Gostana is known for its low-calorie, whole-wheat burgers, while Crostini offers Indian twists to Mediterranean cuisine and dishes up items like brown rice salad, and barley and lentil salad.
Calcutta’s Café Organica, too, is rustling up healthy breakfast options like brown-rice poha with organic potatoes and green peas. Alternatively, try the Italian tofu skewers or dosas made of ragi flour. There are also power-packed smoothies and juices using ingredients whose popularity has soared in recent years such as chia seeds and seabuckthorn. And, of course, there are plenty of oats and offerings like low-calorie muffins using wholewheat flour.

Mallick says she faced many difficulties at the start. For one thing, she had a tough time training the staff to maintain strict standards. It was also tough educating the public about her food. She says: “Initially, people were not aware of many vegetables and ingredients we used and thought healthy meant boring. For instance, if we said dal and kaddu soup, it was rejected outright. So we’ve glamourised the options and made it hip, retaining all the Indian seasonal vegetables like, for instance, white pumpkin and pickled cucumber.” Crostini’s Kalra too has innovatively used Indian ingredients in Mediterranean cuisine like sooji to make pasta and dalia in salad. Bhagat’s staples like idli and dosas are cooked using red rice.

Going one step further, Gupta of Café@Jiwa focuses on various kinds of probiotic attas that come packed with chickpeas and soya. There are also attas that are good for diabetes, blood pressure and weight loss. He says: “One can choose the sauces and fillings to go with these roti-wraps.” Mallick’s café serves seasonal organic vegetables like spinach (which she grows herself), methi, tendli (ivy-gourd), turai (ridged gourd), bitter beans and sweet potato.

But it’s not just about the right ingredients. The entrepreneurs behind these cafés have gone a step further to ensure that the right cooking techniques are used. So, Café Organica in Calcutta avoids using microwaves and aluminium vessels and uses only cold-pressed oils. Gostana’s meat burgers are either grilled or steamed. Bhagat of Bangalore’s Health Zingo café doesn’t refrigerate vegetables, only the sauces and the chutneys. Crostini’s Kalra uses only olive oil for cooking and there are no artificial flavourings and essences in her smoothies and juices.

Several of these cafés also sell organic products. Gupta’s café (he calls it Jiwa Experience Centre-cum-café) has shelves filled with products like chakki-fresh organic attas made from sharbati wholewheat (from Madhya Pradesh) in 1kg packs. His attas are also available online at naturalmantra.com and foodesto.com. Bhagat of Health Zingo focuses on delivering to homes and offices and makes close to 100 of what she calls “nutri-meals” every day. Café Organica in Calcutta has an in-house store, Rainbow, that stocks personal care, body care and organic food products.

To boost business and spread the word among the health conscious about their menus, some cafés also host special evenings. Gostana, for instance, organises sales of vinyl records. Gvalani’s café is a haven for animal lovers who can bring their pets along with them while they relax in its homey ambience. The café even provides freshly cooked healthy pet meals. On a different note, Crostini’s Kalra organises events like cheese-tastings and tarot-reading workshops while The Birdsong in Mumbai holds art-and-craft workshops.

Many of these organic food fans are keen to expand. The Doshis of Calcutta’s Café Organica have already fielded 
inquiries from Ahmedabad and Vadodara. They’re also looking at a bigger space in Calcutta to open another outlet. Health Zingo is eyeing more corporate tie-ups in Bangalore to supply nutri-meals. Gupta wants to expand in another direction and is in the process of launching ready-to-eat snack products made from quinoa and multi-grain flour. Crostini’s Kalra, too, wants to cater to the corporate sector and is scouting for a suitable outlet in Gurgaon.

With the organic food market booming and customers hungry for more, a combination of health and taste is a sure-fire way to stay in the business.