Our World
THE CART · 2013
In 2013, a friend issued a challenge. Either do it, or stop talking about your chai dukaan idea.
In a matter of days, I carpentered a pushcart from discarded wood in my front yard. Put my collection of teas and spices on it. Wheeled it into a crafts fair in Delhi.
No fixed address. No brand. No plan beyond the next cup.
Just chai — and the slow realisation, pop-up after pop-up, that people kept coming back. Not for novelty. For the chai itself.
The cart was not a starting point we were trying to outgrow. It was proof. Before there was a space, there was a market. Before there was a brand, there was a reason to have one.
CHAMPA GALI · HEADQUARTERS
When we found our first permanent home in Champa Gali — one of Delhi’s most genuinely idiosyncratic neighbourhoods — we built it ourselves. Reclaimed glass. Salvaged bricks. Discarded industrial pallets and sustainable commercial pine. The design did not come first. The available materials did. The space became what they allowed it to be.
There is a philosophy in that. It has not changed.
Today Champa Gali is our headquarters, our flagship café, our working kitchen, and our product development lab. The kitchen holds close to 180 ingredients — herbs, spices, botanicals from across India and beyond. The café menu runs to over 75 food items, each developed alongside the chai, with the same pairing logic. New flavours are tested here. New products are refined here.
It is also where our Art and Culture programme has run for years — music, spoken word, theatre, poetry, visual arts, film. Seasonally. Seriously. It has run at each of our locations. It is on pause while we are in Berlin. It will return.
AHMEDABAD · RESIDENCY
Our first residency took us to Ahmedabad — a year-long project that brought the café, the chai, and the cultural programme to a new city and a genuinely different audience.
Not everything worked the way we expected. That was the value of it.
RED FORT · IGNCA · DEC 2023 – MAR 2025
From December 2023 to March 2025, we ran an exhibition café at the Red Fort — one of India’s most significant UNESCO World Heritage Sites — as part of the ABCD project of IGNCA, the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, the nodal cultural body under India’s Ministry of Culture.
The focus was specific. GI-tagged ingredients. The traditional foods of India. Geographical Indication protection means something — Champagne, Parmigiano-Reggiano, Darjeeling tea, Coorg cardamom. These designations exist because place matters. Because what grows where, and how, and in whose hands, changes what ends up in the cup or on the plate. We spent fifteen months making that argument — quietly, through the food itself.
The Art and Culture programme ran here too. Performances. Spoken word. Visual arts. The space was alive in ways that went beyond the menu.
The project is over. The credential stays.
BERLIN · NOW
The European chapter has begun.
We are here. The residency model we have practised across a decade — in Delhi, in Ahmedabad, at the Red Fort — is now pointed at Europe.
A new city each summer. The full Jugmug Thela experience in a new context. The chai story told somewhere it has not been told before.