THE AIR IN the brightly lit, mettalic-themed building in Mumbai’s industrial suburb of Saki Naka is heavy with the aroma of butter and roasting nuts. I am waiting to speak with Sanjana Arora Patel in the factory of the patisserie La Folie. Patel is the founder and executive chef of the newest such shop in Mumbai. As I look on, she riffles through the day’s recipes, and in 30 seconds, tells her team exactly how much of each ingredient should be used for each recipe before sitting back to talk.

“I don’t know why we’ve been positioned as a French patisserie,” she says, when I ask her why she decided to set up a high-end business like this. “We’re very haute and avant-garde and we obsess over our ingredients,” she says. (La Folie in French loosely translates to ‘obsessive madness’.) The menu, consisting of experimental, even wacky, takes on traditional European desserts, drives home her point.

Thirty-year-old Patel started La Folie in January 2014 with a store in Fort, in downtown Mumbai. In March, she opened a new store in the upscale Palladium Mall and Hotel—a rare pace for an experimental food outfit.

But store growth is not her only claim to success. Patel counts among her clientele the who’s who of Mumbai, and her CV includes supplying a low-sugar dessert for a party hosted by the Ambanis to catering for the Godrejs. She has also collaborated with Gauri Khan, wife of Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, to design tropical-flavour desserts complementing Khan’s newest fashion line.

Although La Folie’s minimalist menu does not list prices, most of its desserts cost between Rs 240 and Rs 260 apiece. That’s double the pricing of city rivals Theobroma and Country of Origin, and Delhi-based L’Opera.

THEOBROMA IS CONSIDERED a pioneer in the highly fragmented patisserie space in India. The first shop in the chain was set up in 2004 in Mumbai’s landmark Colaba Causeway, when patisseries could be found only in five-star hotels. Founder and executive chef Kainaz Messman, who studied pastry arts at the ENSP pastry school at Yssingeaux in France, says her aim was to bring Western baked goods to those who could not afford to go to the hotels.

“We didn’t have a five-year plan or even a one-year plan,” says Messman. She started with her mother’s brownie recipe, which was already a big hit in her social circle. The brownies became Theobroma’s signature, and something of an icon of Mumbai’s culinary scene. “It still took me six years to expand to our second store,” Messman says.

Country of Origin’s Kiran Salaskar began the bakery chain four years ago as an afterthought. “We had planned to import gourmet food products, like French cheese, to India, but ran into trouble with regulations. So we changed track and came up with this patisserie business,” says Salaskar. Country of Origin came to be known for its cake in a jar. Salaskar stresses that he has stuck to the credo the chain’s name reflects: desserts done exactly the way they’re in their country of their origin. “We had no marketing or advertising budget,” he says.

Top-of-the-line desserts are now par for the course beyond five-star hotels.
Top-of-the-line desserts are now par for the course beyond five-star hotels.

On the lines of Paul and Ladurée of France, running for generations, L’Opera aims to create India’s very own legacy patisserie chain. “Our son Laurent came to India for his MBA internship with [the appliances company] Usha. He realised good French baked products were not available in Delhi, even in the five-star hotels,” says chairman Kazem Samandari. L’Opera started in 2008, and has since grown to six stores and four tea salons in Delhi and Gurgaon.

LA FOLIE’S PATEL HIT IT OFF with baking early on. Taking a year off from college, she trained as a pastry chef at Le Cordon Bleu, the well-known culinary school in London. She went on to study for a master’s degree in food management at the University of Surrey, followed by a master’s in marketing and strategy at the University of Warwick.

Patel’s father wanted her to join his garment exports business or become an economist, but she convinced him of her talent and passion for baking. Soon she was off to France to learn creative pastry arts at Ecole Gregorie Ferrandi in Paris and Olivier Bajard’s pastry school in Perpignan.

The well-travelled Indian has developed a taste for the authentic, but is also keen to sample new recipes.
The well-travelled Indian has developed a taste for the authentic, but is also keen to sample new recipes.

After stints in a few French kitchens, Patel returned to India. Confident that she could do better than the bakeries in five-star hotels, she decided to start her own. All she needed was a viable business model and a niche.

“We decided to do modern interpretations of traditional French and European desserts. That, combined with the pairing of unusual flavours, makes us different,” she says. So wasabi goes with pink grapefruit, and rhubarb with yuzu (an East Asian citrus fruit).

Hiccups along the way haven’t deterred Patel from keeping La Folie avant-garde. She banks on the loyalty of her customers to constantly push products that are acquired tastes for Indians. Last year, she launched an autumn-winter menu that brought sweet and savoury elements together, including ingredients like beetroot, fennel cream, blood orange, and Bolivian chocolate. Although the menu did not generate much interest initially, customers are slowly warming up to the idea. “My presentations, flavour combinations, and recipes are not only more modern but also friendly to the Indian palate and last longer in our climate,” she says.

Bakeries in India have traditionally been family businesses. But the cost of setting up a patisserie, between Rs 50 lakh and Rs 1 crore, may call for external funding. Equipment, like the finely calibrated ovens used in patisseries, accounts for the bulk of costs.

Initially, Patel put in Rs 60 lakh and raised another Rs 1 crore from family and friends. So far, funding has been kept within that circle, but it may not stay that way for long. “We changed our corporate structure from limited partnership to private limited, which is the best way to go for raising capital from investors later,” she says.

IT’s NOW ALMOST a cliche that India is an exciting playground for world cuisine entrepreneurs. “Indian customers are exposed to so much even if they don’t travel, and they have growing disposable income,” says Theobroma’s Messman.

Food and beverages site FNB News says India’s per-capita bakery consumption is a lowly kilo or two, compared with anything between 10 kg and 50 kg in developed countries. But it estimates that the bakery industry in India will jump to $7 billion (about Rs 45,000 crore) in FY15, led by growth in the branded packaged segment. The site quotes Bunty Mahajan, another Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef and owner of Mumbai-based Deliciae Patisserie, saying that the industry has been transformed in the last few years, with easy availability of high-end ingredients and the influx of foreign-trained chefs.

Salaskar, who is also a promoter of Impresario which runs brands like Mocha and Smokehouse Deli, seconds that. “There was nothing here when I first started as a food investor in 2000,” he says, “but now people are warming up to basic ideas like eating dark chocolate without sweetening it.”

That’s the kind of shift that has helped La Folie develop a steady clientele, in spite of its unconventional recipes and bold pricing—and not just among the city’s elite. “We had customers coming from Panvel and Thane, who complained that the store [in Fort, South Mumbai] was too far away. That’s why we decided to start expanding,” explains Patel.

“Indian customers still associate dessert with chocolate. They like hazelnuts, strawberries, and cream,” says Patel. But they are starting to allow desserts to surprise them. And pay top money to boot.

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