“If you are at FES for the first time, don’t leave without trying our dark chocolate monster with vanilla ice cream,” says Vidur Mayor, co-founder of FES. And standing inside their new Meherchand Market flagship, surrounded by the warm smell of freshly baked cookies and the low hum of a coffee grinder, you believe him entirely.
FES’s newest outpost is not a conventional café. It is, as the brand will tell you, the Cookie Dealer’s house, a three-floor immersive space where each detail, from the signage to the seating, is in service to a larger story.
The Ground Floor: Where the Dealer Is in Action
You enter the space to find a glass counter lined with cookies in varying degrees of gooeyness—chocolate-heavy, golden-edged, rich in the way only New York-style cookies are. Behind it, fresh coffee beans are being brewed. A board on the wall reads, “Support your cookie dealer.” This is the ground floor, the Cookie Dealer’s workspace, the place where he is in action. He serves, shares, and does what he loves most.
The Loft: Where He Chills
Take the stairs up, and the energy is completely different. A sofa fresh out of a F.R.I.E.N.D.S rerun anchors the first floor. There are lanterns overhead, a balcony for smokers, and corners designed for laptop-open, coffee-in-hand afternoons. This is the loft, and it earns its name as a third space where coffee, cookies, and conversations come together. The regulars who come here aren’t just customers; they’re, by design, part of a community.
I settled in with a Matcha Iced Latte and a Walnut Choco Chunk cookie, the latter quickly becoming a personal favourite, and somewhere between the two, the BBQ Mushroom Focaccia Sandwich arrived and promptly stole the show. It’s a reminder that FES, for all its cookie conviction, knows its way around savouries too.
The Lab: If You Know, You Know
The second floor is the most quietly exciting of the three. Called the lab, the place where the Cookie Dealer experiments, it’s intended for workshops and events, but open for anyone who makes it up. A video of the Cookie Dealer and his dog, Fudge, plays on a loop—two figures in the middle of a recipe, mid-experiment. If you’ve seen it, you’re in the club.
The Cookie That Started It All
Chef Ved Gautam, who has been with FES since its inception and joined full-time about four years ago, describes his journey into baking as one he didn’t choose so much as one he arrived at. “I am a baker by design,” he says, “because I work for FES.”
His hero product, and arguably the brand’s, is the dark chocolate monster. “This cookie found place on FES’s shelf since day one, and it continues to,” Gautam says. “The recipe has just been evolving. It actually shows my journey as a baker here.”
Baking it eggless, which FES does across its entire menu, has been the defining challenge. Eggs act as a binder in most baking; without them, texture becomes a negotiation. “We had to do a lot of trials, come back with different recipes to have the same gooeyness and flavour without using eggs,” Gautam explains. “That was the biggest challenge.”
The payoff, though, is visible in how readily customers have returned. Cookies have become a gifting staple—for birthdays, colleagues, and parents. A category that India largely knew as a side product on pastry shelves, or simply as biscuits, is quietly becoming something more.
A Slice of New York, With Its Own Story
The brand’s inspiration draws from Levain Bakery in New York, chunky, indulgent, unapologetically generous cookies that never quite made it to India in any serious form. “New York-style chunky cookies are very famous, but India never really had any options for those,” says Mayor. FES has spent the last 1.5 years trying to change that.
The cookie, he believes, sits at the perfect intersection of nostalgia, along with novelty, a format familiar enough to feel comforting, new enough to keep people curious. A category India largely knew as a side product on pastry shelves, or simply as biscuits, is becoming something more.
As for what’s next, Mayor has a clear vision. “Every neighbourhood can have a FES because the culture is so different in every neighbourhood,” he says. More locations across Delhi NCR are on the cards in the next one and a half to two years, with neighbouring cities to follow. “We want to leave a legacy behind on how desserts are looked at, and we want cookies to be the heroes of our dessert category.”
At Meherchand, that ambition has found a home worthy of it.
Address: Shop No 117, Meharchand Market, Lodi Colony, New Delhi
Price for two: INR 600 (approximately)
Read more: Think Every Delish Dessert Needs Chocolate? We’re Here To Prove You Wrong
Also read: 5 New Restaurants In Delhi NCR That Will Change The Way It Dines
