End of an era in Delhi: Iconic cafe, book store at Khan Market shut

NEW DELHI: Cafes are not just about coffee spoons. As the

iconic Café Turtle

and Full Circle, the

book store

that housed it, in

Khan Market

shut on Sunday, there is a sense that an era has ended.


A

cultural oasis

in the middle of one of the most expensive retail destinations in the world, Café Turtle was a pit stop for writers, journalists, artists, book lovers, travellers and more, all enchanted by the sense of unhurried homeliness it served alongside its much loved cakes.

When it opened in December 2000, Delhi was still new to the café culture. Spaces for the young or arty were few. Khan Market itself was a shadow of its present self.

Publishers Poonam and Shekhar Malhotra, owners of the historic Hind Pocket Books, who started their imprint Full Circle for “new age” books in 1998, found this sleepy market as the

perfect home

for their book store with Café Turtle within it, on the lines of European neighbourhood cafes.

The first home was a spacious plot facing a beautiful silk cotton tree — where La Opera now stands. “Profit was not our motive. We just wanted a nice expansive space where people could be themselves,” says Poonam.

People could sit, browse, stare, chat, eat a slice of home-made cake. “The day we opened, friends like Arun Kapur (director of Vasant Valley school) and Dr Ashwani Chopra (of Aashlok Hospital) came over and served as waiters,” remembers Poonam. All cakes were made in the publisher’s home — lemon, carrot, orange, banana and walnut, and a gooey chocolate cake. There were fresh salads and juices.

A few months down the line, two college kids waiting to get into catering schools abroad were roped in to cook in their own homes. One of them, Manu Chandra would go on to helm Olive Bangalore.

All through the changing times, even in the midst of the fiercely competitive world of restaurant retail, Café Turtle remained a thing rare to find in India: a restaurant that is about a community, and grew into a Delhi landmark even as it shifted to the middle lane in 2009.

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