Gshot Coffee Roasters in Assagao is our new love. This community-run cafe-meets-roastery offers specialty coffee like no one else, has a gourmet menu with dishes made from the freshest ingredients and a chill, music-filled vibe that lets you disconnect in the true sense.
Java Junkies, This Garden Cafe's Laboratory Brews The Most Perfect Coffee
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What Makes It Awesome
Run by a motley bunch of folks who came together last year for their love of food and geekily made coffee, this small cafe might only in its second season, but is already whipping up a storm.
The care that goes into visiting coffee estates across the country, sampling their beans, roasting, tasting and the process of finalising the beans that’ll be crushed and roasted to make your cuppa, is mind blowing. And how do we know this? Well, we saw it all come together in the coffee lab where graphs and temperature controlled machines left nothing to chance. This is why, the coffee (the menu has about 20 varieties) collected from four estates (fifth one will be coming soon), tastes exactly the same, each single time.
Insane coffee isn’t where it all ends. This perfectionist approach extends to the food too. It might seem borderline obsessive but they handpick the salad leaves that make it to your plate.
We tried the bread with slow roasted tomatoes, pesto and cream cheese and everything was polished off till the last crumb. The Cortado, Espresso and Iced Latte we had were the best we've had in a long time – enough to bring our groggy, sulky selves to life, and how.
Because everything’s made the good old traditional way, including the bread dough being fermented over three days and nut butters being hand-ground, the taste is infinitely better than the mass produced counterparts across other bakeries. But again, good things take time, so if you're going to be rushing them to speed up things in the kitchen or the lab, find yourself another cafe, please.What Could Be Better
We wish they were open for evening coffee and dinner but having a small core team that runs the place has its challenges and they promise they won’t change their timings till they’re sure they can sustain the same quality. Now that's a good and a bad thing, right?
Pro-Tip
The cafe shuts in the monsoon months and is open daily (apart from Mondays) from 10am-3:30pm.
They sell whole wheat, seeded bread (and, it’s yum), nut butters, coffee powder and homemade granola that you can buy if you give them a day’s notice to manage supplies and bake/roast/grind fresh.
Oh, and their website will be up and running in about two weeks so all this goodness will get delivered across India. Sigh… We’re waiting.
