If you’ve spent any time in New York or London lately, you’ll know Blank Street Coffee, the sleek, small-format American coffeehouse chain that cracked the code on high-quality, high-frequency café culture and now operates across 90-odd locations globally. India’s been waiting for its own version. Turns out, it’s arrived not in a flashy South Delhi address or a Bandra laneway, but in the quiet residential stretch of Arjun Marg in Gurugram, and it’s wearing lilac.
Gram Street Coffee, Chef Vanshika Bhatia’s newest venture, is compact, considered, and well planned. Bhatia brings serious kitchen credentials to the counter with her experience at Le Cordon Bleu, as well as time at Noma and Gaggan. But Gram Street is not about flex but about making the everyday café experience better.
The Savouries
The food menu at Gram Street is longer than you’d expect from a space of that size, almost 40 items, and it punches well above the café-food average. Bhatia has structured it with restaurant-trained instincts with ciabatta and Japanese milk bread sandos, baked puffs, salads, and small bites in cups. The dish names alone earn their place, be it the Parmela Anderson, Chuck Bass, or Mr Tikka in Paris—it is either your sense of humour or it isn’t, but the food underneath backs the confidence.
I tried two savouries. Mr Tikka in Paris brought together spiced chicken in a format that appeared genuinely thoughtful rather than fusion for its own sake. The K Drama, a nod to Korean-inflected flavours, had the kind of heat-to-salt balance that makes you pick at it long after you meant to stop. These are dishes built from technique, and not just following trends, and the difference is legible on the plate.
The Drinks
This is where Gram Street does something most cafés don’t: it treats coffee, matcha, and gelato-led beverages as equally weighted disciplines, not a hierarchy with coffee at the top and everything else as an afterthought.
The coffee sourcing tells you everything about Bhatia’s approach. Three house blends, each from a different Indian region: Karnataka’s Concrete for body and kick, Andhra Pradesh’s Commute for balance and a caramel note, and Nagaland’s Community, that is 100% Arabica, citrus-forward, roasted in-house, for the cold brew crowd. “We sampled hundreds of green beans from various estates across India and roasted them ourselves to figure out what worked for us,” Bhatia said.
My Gram Latte sat squarely in the Commute register, smooth, not sharp, the kind of drink that doesn’t demand your attention but rewards it. The G Street Matcha was the more interesting order, which was a cold matcha with tender coconut water, lighter than it looks, with none of that lingering grassiness that puts people off. The matcha program here is built on sourcing and balance rather than on aesthetics alone, and it shows. “Our matcha drinks are simplified with flavours that make even the people who don’t enjoy the flavour want to come back for more,” claimed Bhatia.
The Desserts
The gelato is arguably the whole point. In a city where the word gets applied loosely, Bhatia has taken it seriously enough to complete a gelato-making course herself, source Carpigiani machinery from Bologna, and develop recipes without flavour shortcuts. “By making it ourselves, we have better control of the ingredients that go into making each and every flavour,” she explains. “Sourcing externally might be the easy way out, but it’s not my style.”
The Blue Valentine, her dessert offering that I tried, is the kind of thing that recalibrates your expectations of what a café can do at this price point. The Crownie, which is a croissant-brownie hybrid baked into a layered, slightly flaky, slightly fudgy thing, delivered exactly what it promised. The gelato menu itself runs from the indulgent—smoked chocolate, chocolate hazelnut, caramelised croissant—to the restrained —frozen yoghurt with granola and poached pear, sugar-free variants using erythritol and stevia, sorbets that keep things light. There’s room for both the person who wants a treat and the one who doesn’t.
The Space
When you walk past the glass frontage, the first thing that registers is the palette having lilac walls, chrome accents, and clean lines. Inside the 10-seater, the tables are deliberately small, placed close but not cramped, which is a setup that makes you eat, drink, and make way. There is no space, physical or philosophical, for a laptop. “The space is designed as such that it’s fast-paced and high energy,” Bhatia says.
“Our concept is that you enjoy the drinks, the food and the vibe.” One corner is given over to merch, tumblers, and sunglasses, while the other holds the real action, with bakes on display, a Carpigiani gelato machine buzzing, and a coffee counter that means business. The design language is coherent and intentional, which is not just Instagram-worthy but also simply feels good to be inside.
