The 100ft Boutique Restaurant, run by Sridhar.V (in picture), Sridhar.P and Meghna.V, is one of the first places that introduced the concept of clubbing food with retail therapy in Bangalore; Pic by Jagadeesh NV

It’s a win-win business formula for Hyderabad-based restaurateur and amateur artist Vivek Rao. In his sprawling 3,000sqft coffee house-cum-art gallery you will find Rao juggling between being an art curator and a more earthly bound restaurant owner. His café/art gallery Beyond Coffee, located in Hyderabad’s smart Jubilee Hills district has a range of paintings displayed on stark white walls and it’s also a hot spot for coffee lovers.

Amidst the aroma of freshly roasted coffee and freshly baked cakes you’ll occasionally catch curious customers enquiring about the works of art displayed on the walls as they sip on the freshly brewed coffee. Rao, who has been an amateur artist from his childhood, waxes eloquent on the works up on the walls — they are mostly new artists and are priced anywhere between Rs 5,000 and Rs 1.5 lakh. “Selling food and art is a great amalgamation of the two businesses and is working brilliantly,” he says.

Like Rao, a number of entrepreneurs are serving up fusion platters combining their eateries and coffee shops with other lifestyle products. The aim: to boost earnings when customers who stop for a cup of coffee pick up a work of art as well — or vice versa.

So, at these trendy eateries with stores, once the foodie in you is satiated, you could try a spot of retail therapy. “These days because of traffic and parking problems people find it convenient to shop and eat from the same place and save time,” says Smitha Murthy of Bangalore-based The Ants Café, situated in the city’s Indiranagar area.

From The Ant’s Café it’s a short hop and jump to Bangalore’s bustling 100ft Road known for its mushrooming eateries and lifestyle stores. Some way down the street is the aptly named 100ft Boutique Restaurant. It’s no surprise perhaps that it was one of the first boutique restaurants that introduced the concept of clubbing food with a shopping experience to Bangaloreans. Run by three partners Sridhar.V, Sridhar.P and Meghna.V — the 3,500sqft boutique is interwoven with the restaurant. “In terms of business, the boutique is the jewel of the restaurant,” says Sridhar.V, who introduced the concept by getting home decor products like vases, lamps and tableware and also designer wear (by upcoming designers), and accessories like bag and jewellery and more.

How it often works, says Sridhar.V, is that when customers come to dine for the first time they notice eye-catching products and when they visit the restaurant the second time around, they come for the sole purpose of shopping.

Revolving around the same concept but on a slightly experimental note, fashion designer Shani Himanshu of CellDSGN (a fashion and design consultancy firm) and owner of fashion brand 11.11, co-owns the restaurant/store The Grey Garden with business partners Avinash Kumar and Shalabh Singh in Delhi’s happening Hauz Khas Village.

You can shop from an impressive selection of Italian gourmet ingredients at Saket and Nivedita (in the picture) Agarwal’s fine dining restaurant Casa Toscana

But there’s a crucial twist on the menu at The Grey Garden. It’s also a restaurant with a difference, where occasionally the food is prepared by enthusiastic amateur chefs and not professionals.

The Grey Garden is a small 16-cover restaurant squeezed into a 300sqft area. After your meal, you can check out Shani’s collections for women which include voluminous, structural and flowing drapes. The tables at the restaurant are designed by CellDSGN and can also be bought. The store also offers iPad sleeves, Italian leather clutches, vintage perfume bottles and neck pieces.

Cut to Calcutta and you will find the plush Italian restaurant, Casa Toscana on 14 Sarat Chatterjee Avenue, for guests who would also like to take home quality Italian ingredients. The 6,000sqft restaurant run by husband-wife duo, Saket and Nivedita Agarwal, is spread across three floors. Once you have feasted on the sumptuous Italian fare at the restaurant, you can pick from a selection of Italian gourmet ingredients like Arborio rice, a variety of pastas, olive oils, cheese (from the restaurant’s cheese room) and herbs — sourced from several distributors across India and Italy.

As soon as you enter the restaurant, on your right, you’ll find a 250sqft store, called Casa Paneterria, inviting you to pick homemade jams, marmalades, mustard, flavoured oils and vinegars made by the Casa Paneterria division.

Christine E. Rai’s café Zaffiro with its Mediterranean fare is the perfect complement to her lifestyle store Zaza Home

While diners like to tuck into the restaurant’s pastas and risottos, some of the hot-sellers at the food store are the capsicum and chilli jams and chocolate flavoured mustard jars.“The idea was to create private dining rooms, a lounge bar, a cheese room and a store for good quality Italian ingredients to take home and cook,” says Agarwal.

But if Rao, the Agarwals and most of the other entrepreneurs introduced a shopping space in their eateries, it was the other way round for Delhi-based Christine E. Rai. When she decided to open her lifestyle store Zaza Home, she always visualised it with a café at some point. “I had always marked a café on the original blueprint of the store so we created the space from the beginning,” says Rai.

Rai, who has worked in India, as a buyer for international firms for over a decade started Zaza Home with the idea of bringing Indian-made but “foreign designed” products to Indian consumers. “Most of the wonderful products being made in India were exported and a very little of it was available in the local market,” she says.

So, Rai’s store today houses products from major export production centres like Moradabad, Jodhpur, Jaipur, Panipat and from many parts of south India. And the café, Zaffiro, complements it with Mediterranean fare, sandwiches, home-baked cakes and coffee, apart from beverages like wine and beer. “The two businesses complement each other as they both bring clients into the other area,” says Rai.

Fashion designer Shani Himanshu is one of the owners of restaurant, The Grey Garden, where you can also check out his brand’s 11.11 collection for women

What attracts more and more customers is not only food but also the eclectic mix of furnishing and decorative items from designer brands like Banjara, Indi Bindi and Purple Jungle. “Crafted furniture, furnishing fabrics, lamps and drinking glasses and jugs are the fast moving products here,” says Rai. You could find something as affordable as wooden and glass bangles for Rs 50 each or, alternatively, prices can go upto Rs 45,500 for something like a canopy bed.

Similarly, the 100ft Boutique Restaurant also houses home decor products by about 30 designers from all over India. There is everything from furniture, showpieces and jewellery, to bar accessories. Amongst the brands on sale are Happily Unmarried and Designwise from Delhi, Rhinestone Art Pottery from Pondicherry, aromatherapy products from Auroville and bed linen from Wintrack Designs in Chennai. You can expect to pick products starting from Rs 250 to Rs 25,000 in the store.

The Ants Café was started by Smitha Murthy and Pradeep Krishnappa to promote Northeastern crafts in cosmopolitan Bangalore

While these are all primarily commercial ventures, most of these stores and restaurants are also providing a platform to young artists to sell their work. “The idea is to encourage and support artists of all genres and types in order to give them an opportunity that conventional galleries are not willing to provide,” says Rao. He has a long list of artists who wish to display their art work at Beyond Coffee — so the café’s walls are booked for the next six months.

At a slightly different level, Murthy’s two-storey The Ants Café is an offshoot of an Assam-based NGO ‘The ANT’ (The Action North East Trust). The Ants Café was started three years ago by Murthy and her husband Pradeep Krishnappa to promote the less well-known Northeastern culture and crafts to cosmopolitan Bangaloreans.

Vivek Rao (above) plays both curator and restaurant-owner at Beyond Coffee, which is his café-cum-art

While Murthy graduated from the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology her husband Krishnappa comes from a family of textiles manufacturers and takes care of business and marketing side of things.

Initially, the duo wanted to introduce a Northeastern food joint but weren’t sure how it would be received. Instead, they focused on sourcing the traditional handicrafts typical to the seven-sister states of Assam, Nagaland, Tripura, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh and trained the craftsmen to use their skills to create more saleable products. Along with the store, the couple decided to run a cafe serving Continental and Italian fare.

The ground floor which is spread over about 1,900sq ft is the store area while the space on the first floor is given over to the rooftop café with some bamboo furniture displayed for sale. At the store on the ground floor you will find hand-woven fabrics from the Bodo tribe of Assam while a collection of cane and bamboo comes from Meghalaya, Nagaland and Tripura.

So while the customers get the best of organic products and great craftsmanship, the craftsmen get the opportunity to make a decent living.

Says Murthy: “It’s a model that benefits everyone.” A sentiment that’s echoed by all the entrepreneurs who’re catering to the foodie and shopaholic in you.