Enjoy Street Magic & Homely Assamese Food Starting At INR 100 At This Kasol-Type Cafe

Run by three friends who got together for the love of food, Bhaat Khau Bowl is a tiny cafe that does four types of Assamese rice bowls along with Maggie and other snacky tidbits. Not just that. They let you play FIFA, have impromptu jams and are happy if you just sit back with a book.

Few months before Khau Bhaat opened, they got a decrepit room in a Safdarjung house with a banyan tree cutting right through the entry wall. The going was anything but easy but the three cafe owners pooled in all their savings and knew that they had to rewrite the fate of this jungle-like place. So when they got together to work on the interiors, a lot of awkward questions thrown at them by passersby. Is it an art gallery? Is it a studio? Is it a hostel? But they continued to fuss over every tiny corner and persevered through it all. 

Next, they printed some popular posters {right from The Beatles to The Flintstones & Harry Potter to Bob Dylan}, Shubro {the photographer and artist} made some wall art and strung some fairy lights and they got some mattresses on the floor and boom! They had a cafe! A month into business, it has slowly added Ludo and guitars and a monitor to play trippy music {or games at INR 50 an hour}.

The third friend in the matrix, Dhiraj, works with RBS {Royal Bank of Scotland} through the day and regales cafe visitors with his street magician skills on the weekends {keep your eye firmly on that playing card}. Together, these creative souls don’t just bring a laid-back vibe that most sit-down Delhi cafes can never recreate, they have somehow also managed to recreate traditional Assamese flavours they know from their mothers/grannies’ kitchens.

Yes, the menu is very limited but the idea is to do Assamese and do it well. From the rice bowls, we tried the Murgi Bhaat and the Rajma Bhaat. They also have pork and fish done in typical North Eastern style. The flavours were perfect and peculiar and the accompanying raja mircha chutney and a mustard-y one were a great addition. We are next making a trip with friends who miss non-fussy northeastern food and are forever on a budget… With two glasses of lemon soda and two rice bowls, our bill was INR 260 and needless to say, we had a hearty meal. 

“If people don’t want to order, that’s okay too. They can just come and chill and have chai. We don’t want people to eat in a rush and leave. We’d love for them to put up their feet and stay on for as long as they like,” Sumit told us.

Now that might be a small gesture, but so heartfelt that it made us smile even on a rather uneventful afternoon.

So may be we’ll see you at a game of carom and we can perhaps share honey pancakes that will make an appearance starting Nov 1. Or hey, they got an amazing collection of chill music to keep conversations going. And, Wi-Fi. Yay!

If we were you, we’d go on a weekend because the chance of catching some street magic and sampling their weekend special Assamese thali are too sweet to pass.

PS: The sweet folks surprise you with a free meal on your special days like birthdays and anniversaries. Now you know what we meant when we said the place is all heart and creativity?