At Suzette, Jeremie (centre), Antonia and Pierre offer a wide assortment of Brittany-style crepes made with buckwheat flour. Pic by Gajanan Dudhalkar

What are those tantalising aromas drifting in the air? Take your choice of exotic bakery products from Swiss-style golden crusted breads, French macaroons, home-baked Dutch stroopwafels — cookies to you and me — to quiches made in the Normandy tradition and delicious crepes from Brittany.

They’re all coming straight out of the ovens of a new wave of expatriates who are setting up patisseries, boulangeries and creperies in this country. Curiously enough, they’re not necessarily trained bakers or cooks but are mostly professionals from different fields who’ve given up their careers to indulge in their passion for food.

Yet they know their crusty breads, can recommend a stunning variety of bagels, offer a superb selection of quiches, and in the same instant toss up a crepe that could either be a sweet delight or a savoury treat.

Call it the café culture, the trend of artisanal bakeries catching up or simply the love for authentic fare, this select set is aiming to recreate comfort food from back home as well as introduce it to foodies in India.

Lalita de Goederen’s Bagel Café has about seven varieties of bagels and a choice of 40 toppings Pix: Jagan Negi

Rupinder Sharma

Take Lalita de Goederen, a 31-year-old brunette from Amsterdam, who ditched her PR career and launched a bagel café in New Delhi’s satellite city of Gurgaon two years ago.

It all started with a quest for good bread after she arrived in India with her husband. “The idea was to find the perfect breakfast place — something that fell in between run-of-the-mill coffee shop chains and exclusive five-star-hotel coffee shops,” she says with a wide grin.

Her passion for breads, espresso and a ‘gezellig’ ambience — the English equivalent of this would be cosy and warm — is reflected in the Bagel’s Café. Along with the mouth-watering bagels, the other standout items are the stroopwafels — thin round waffles with caramel filling — that are baked at home by de Goederen.

“At one time about 15-odd bakers back home in Holland knew how to make them. Now there are just four of them left with the know-how,” she laughs. The stroopwafels are delicious and crunchy and are best when you have them traditionally — the Dutch way — placed atop a hot cup of coffee, tea or cocoa to soften them which releases the flavours of vanilla, caramel and cinnamon.

Like de Goederen, the lack of crusty breads in India was what pushed Patricia Beerli, a 37-year-old from Switzerland, to open up her own Swiss patisserie. Her shop is in the dusty lanes of Ghitorni Village in Southwest Delhi. But that doesn’t stop her customers from dropping in to pick up their daily array of breads and pastries.

Beerli’s strength lies in the variety of breads she puts on the countertop. She bakes an amazing 30-odd varieties including the Swiss Sunday bread called Zopf, Italian ciabatta and delicious French baguettes. She also makes gluten-free bread, German rye bread and pumpernickel.

“The nicest thing that I heard after I opened my bakery last November is that the quality made a customer nostalgic. He said my croissants made him remember the ones in Paris,” says Beerli. She arrived in India from the Swiss town of Wil along with her family of five children and husband who works for the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation.

At L’Opera, Laurent Samandari puts freshly baked French goodies like baguettes, macaroons and butter croissants on the counter Pix: Jagan Negi

Pix: Rupinder Sharma

Now, if you happen to be in Mumbai on a lazy morning and are in need of a pick-me-up, it’s Suzette you are looking for. No, we’re not talking about a person but a charming creperie that’s run by a trio of French expats, all in their late 20s, in the busy Nariman Point business district.

The owners, Jeremie, Antonia and Pierre — they go strictly by their first names to keep it informal — offer a wide assortment of sweet and savoury crepes in the tiny place into which you can shoe-horn just 20-odd people.

Your typical day at Suzette, which launched some six months back, could begin with the Campagne, a crisp buckwheat crepe served with a rich filling of chicken, bacon, goat cheese, honey and toasted walnuts. Or the Sud — a crepe filled with cream of tuna, fresh tomatoes, capers and lemon. And while these aren’t exactly what you would call diet food, the threesome is soaking up enthusiastic appreciation from food lovers.

Their other hot selling points are the rich Callebaut hot chocolate, tea from renowned French firm Mariage Frères, healthy salads and yoghurt-whisked ‘smoozies’. “It’s the way we French pronounce smoothies,” laughs Jeremie, who decided to settle in India along with wife Antonia — they both came as exchange students at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Meanwhile in Goa, Michele Fernandes, a former air hostess with Pan Am, is known for her quiches, tarts and baked goodies. Originally from Normandy, she married a Goan and now has a café in Anjuna that she opened two years ago.

Patricia Beerli’s strength is in the variety of breads she bakes, from the Swiss Zopf to German rye breads Pix: Jagan Negi

Pix: Rupinder Sharma

Her forte lies in baking the freshest fresh-fruit mini tarts and the typically French dessert called Charlotte Malakoff — a cake lined with biscuits resembling ladyfingers. “The idea when I started baking was to bring in butter and cream which Normandy is known for,” she says.

Fernandes is also well-known for the quiches she bakes at the end of the week for her stall at the Saturday Night Market in Arpora. “The hotsellers are the Spinach with Blue Cheese Quiche, Quiche Lorraine, Tuna and Olive Quiche and Zucchini-Basil Quiche,” she says.

And if you are in the mood for more French fare, try the swanky L’Opera in Delhi’s Khan Market. There you find racks of traditional baguettes, butter croissants, lemon meringues and colourful pink, green and yellow macaroons.

The patisserie was started in March by Laurent Samandari, a 26-year-old French-Persian from Paris. Samandari who began working in Delhi as a marketing professional with the fan company Usha International, says somewhere along the line his chocolate genes — he’s related to the family that started Nestle — kicked in.

Initially, he had French expats and foreign travellers coming in for a bite but now he’s also getting plenty of Indians walking in for their breads and croissants.

Even though most of the new bakers are amateurs in the business, they are looking to expand rapidly. Samandari has invested in a sprawling 3,000sqft production facility in Noida where he churns out breads such as Pain de Campagne, otherwise known as French country bread, Grenoblois which is stuffed with walnuts and raisins) and brioche loafs.

The Bagel’s de Goederen has opened up three more cafés in the last one year including one in Gurgaon, a café in the trendy Defence Colony market and another in Hauz Khas in Delhi. Beerli meanwhile, has opened an outlet in Defence Colony and is busy making plans to start a patisserie in Vasant Vihar in a few months.

Alain Coumont’s giant roundels and loaves of handmade bread are what draw the crowds to his café

Though they are newbies in business, some of these expats have done courses to ensure that they bring the authentic experience to town. For instance, Jeremie, Antonia and Pierre, the owners of Suzette who have roots in Brittany, gave up full-time jobs and went back to France to pick up some specialised skills. The three jetted off to Brittany, the acknowledged crepe capital of the world, where they trained at Ecole du Ble Noir, a school that focuses on crepe making.

“Antonia was working with an NGO related to education, I was into the mergers and acquisitions sector and Pierre was working at the French Chambers of Commerce when we decided to team up,” says Jeremie.

“Serving crepes is our spin on dosas, paranthas and chillas,” he adds. “No one here has been doing it the Brittany-style with buckwheat flour or ‘quttu ki atta’,” he notes, carefully enunciating the Hindi words.

There is also at least one seasoned name that has set up shop in India. The famous Belgian baker Alain Coumont, known for his Le Pain Quotidien chain of cafés, recently opened up an outlet in Colaba, Mumbai. As its name suggests, Le Pain Quotidien (daily bread) is mainly about bread. Coumont’s giant roundels and loaves of handmade bread are marvellous to look at.

Coumont says two things are crucial to his Mumbai café gameplan. Most importantly, he uses only organic ingredients in the kitchen. In addition to that, he also feels it’s crucial to foster community spirit in the café. He says: “We try our best to create a warm environment that allow us to slow down, share good food and good conversations with good friends whether we arrived with them, or just met them for the first time around our communal table.”

Coumont who has adopted Montpellier in France as his hometown, says it took time to perfect the recipes before opening shop in Mumbai.

“We spent several months testing and tweaking our recipes so we could adapt for things like humidity levels and flour grade, and still produce authentic, handmade bread without chemicals or additives,” he says.

Others like Samandari tested out a degustation menu on his Indian and French friends in 2009, a year before he opened his patisserie in Khan Market. “It gave me a leg up in the business to know what would work and wouldn’t work,” he smiles.

Once upon a time Indians would have been conservative about their choice of foods but that has been changing pretty rapidly. So there are plenty of takers for bagels, stroopwafels, pumpernickel and much more.