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The Indian Coffee House chain in India

Bean there, done that

ColinT
2006-05-13 17:04:05

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from the bucket?) in paper cups. Somehow drinking coffee from a paper cup in a fast food restaurant doesn’t feel quite the same as drinking it in a Viennese coffeehouse. It doesn’t taste the same either. Sadly, these days those traditional houses are facing strong competition from the McCoffee world.

After having sampled the delights of coffee around the globe, I have come to conclude that there is only one place to drink it: India. And there is only one establishment to drink it in – the India Coffee House. There are around 160 branches throughout the country, and I’ve visited branches in Shimla, Allahabad, Pondicherry, Calcutta, Trivandrum and many places besides and have never been disappointed. Whenever I visit a new place, one of the first things I do is find out whether there is an ICH in town.

Black-and-white framed photographs of Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, and Indira Gandhi usually adorn the walls of each ICH, and the waiters are dressed in shabby, white (well, whitish) uniforms. They are pretty basic places, where the decor generally takes a back seat to the low prices and delicious dosas and masala dishes on offer. Unlike the new, trendy coffee bars now in India, there is no long and winding coffee menu to choose from. There is no need to confuse your lattי with your cappuccino or your macchiato with your mocha. Coffee comes as coffee, no frills, no fancy names. And it’s absolutely delicious. For four or five rupees per cup, you can’t complain.

Each ICH seems to have its own clientele. Depending on which branch you happen to be in, you may be rubbing shoulders with vacationing families, lawyers, students, or men who sit at wobbly tables on wobbly chairs, hiding behind newspapers and discussing the issues of the day. And each ICH has its own distinct character. For example, the one in Thiruvananthapuram, near the train station, has good food served in a strange leaning-tower-of-Pisa-like spiral building. Others can be a bit dingy and don’t have most of the items on the menu. The elaborate headdresses on the waiters are usually a metaphor for the type of service on offer: clean, starched and upright, or limp and ill-fitting. But one thing is always guaranteed: the fare will be excellent.

Unlike the trendy Starbucks, Caffט Nero or Costa coffee bars in the West, traditional coffee houses possess a certain authenticity. That’s what I like about the ICH. It operates as a worker’s co-operative and is unmolested by the cynicism of the corporate world. And for better or worse, it shows. Maybe it’s a place trapped in time. But it’s a place in time that I prefer. After all, coffee is just coffee, and it has been around for ages. That is, until someone “rediscovered” it and then reinvented it as the latest lifestyle product. You can keep your ‘‘double mint mocha decaf skim lattי”. Just give me plain old coffee in plain old surroundings.

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