Kolkata’s coffee culture is nothing new, but over the past ten years, it has evolved into one with a more contemporary perspective. There was always a demand for a café created especially for a generation to sit there and use free WiFi and use it as a location to socialize socially, especially in the Salt Lake City area. Despite the fact that cafés are now the hub of contemporary cultural discussions and exchanges, the desire to gather there for a cup of coffee still exists. Salt Lake has long yearned for a café that draws coffee connoisseurs, college students, and weekday employees with laptops while allowing families to enjoy their breakfasts and an all-day menu that pairs coffee and food.

And this is how Craft Coffee came into the scene.

And what better way to mark a year of solid relationships built by the brand offering freshly roasted, handcrafted coffee to the customers than by bringing it closer to the local salt lake area coffee enthusiasts. They needed to create a similarly intimate and unmatched multisensory experience serving their signature fusion coffee handcrafted drinks paired with continental food and freshly baked treats from their in-house bakery & confectionary because they have quickly built a strong and loyal customer base of clients from the Salt Lake area visiting their Ballygunge Park Experience Centre.

The manual brewing bar on the terrace offers an experience where guests can interact with the baristas and learn about the complexities of coffee roasting and manual brewing methods like a siphon, pour-over, Turkish, and french press, to mention a few. The main bar serves regular and specialty beverages.

The +6000 sq feet of the area was meticulously created and constructed while maintaining key brand components in an effort to realize customers’ ideal coffee experiences. The architecture also draws inspiration from a historical perspective, but with an eccentric twist in its modern color scheme. It is complete with brand ikat patterns, handcrafted lights made by local artisans, handcrafted crockery sourced from Khurja, and lush green zones created in the courtyard and terrace.

Along with their promise to provide freshly roasted coffee from their own in-house roasting unit with the opening of the Salt Lake Experience Centre, they also hope to add a handcrafted vegan fusion chocolate and coffee pairing element through a different project of ours called “Criollo.” The facility also has a gourmet shop where trained baristas assist customers in selecting freshly roasted single estate coffee beans that suit their palates and are ground to their specifications, bakery goods, home brewing equipment, as well as a line of organic skincare products that are based on coffee.

In keeping with the hub and spoke strategy, they have also established a 40-seater boutique cafe with a live kitchen in the City Centre 1 mall.

As a company, they will keep improving their reputation for quality coffee in Kolkata and eventually go national in the months to come.

Priyanka Dutta