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Wed 25 Dec. 2024
Bouffage Café & Bistro is a café that transcended and changed the way people thought of cafés owing to its extensive food menu, innovative take on traditional Indian cuisines, quality customer service and their ability to reach out to new potential customers.
Today we dive deep into the love of food culture at one of Nagpur’s most loved cafés with the owners, Anshul and Dewansh Jaiswal.
- What was the idea behind Bouffage’s menu?
We always found with the big brands, franchises served food that was standardized, cost-effective at the expense of the experience, and most importantly they generally catered to one dimension cuisine. We wanted to address this issue.
The second most important thing that we noticed was that the majority of the restaurants serving multi-cuisine food managed to concentrate well on one or two cuisines, which left the other cuisines craving for attention. Also, there was either a Café, or a restaurant, one was casual, and the other formal fine dining. We wanted to come up with a menu that combined those two to perfection, a casual place, hip, breezy with good chilled out music, where people can laugh, listen to their favorite music, sing along even, and talk their hearts out with the people they loved.
Hence the Bouffage menu was created with this concept in mind, which is serving no compromise food, food that was served as it was supposed to be, we wanted the major heroes of our food to be the experience and indulgence. Bouffage itself means “A grand feast”. We wanted to serve food for the soul, food that was made with the love for it, rather than just profits.
- What is so special about the menu?
Indian society is set on the pillars of big families, big groups of friends, who like to hang out together, eat together, and have fun together. This was one of the most important factors while designing the menu.
For most of us, a good time means going out with your entire family or friends, eating the food we love, having loads of fun, sometimes going across two, maybe three generations of people dining out together. While this is the best part, people of different generations, ethnicity mean people with different choices, which lead to compromises either because the restaurant didn’t serve the cuisine they wanted, or even if it did, it was not ideally the restaurant’s specialty.
We designed the menu with exactly this in mind, to accommodate the choices of a baby and millennials, to the adults and even the elderly.
One place where no one needs to compromise, everyone in the family gets to eat what they love. From burgers & sandwiches to kebabs and North Indian main course, from kinds of Italian Pasta and pizzas to oriental and Asian food, from French Fries, nachos & poutine to dal khichdi, biryanis, and pulao. Even the desserts keep rotating weekly, we keep it on display for our patrons to see and choose for themselves what they like.
- What special methods do you use while preparing the food?
With the vast variety of cuisines that we serve, it was very important for us to serve every cuisine to perfection. We have a strict no-compromise policy when it comes to the selection of the best ingredients. We worked very hard and went to great lengths to acquire the best possible ingredients from across the country and if needed, the world.
Here are a few examples.
The kebabs that we serve have the rare spices and herbs that we source from the foothills of the Himalayas, from Nepal, and the black pepper we source from Mahabs in the south.
When it comes to food, we follow the saying:- all good things take time, effort, and dedication and hence the serving time at Bouffage will be more than a lot of other restaurants, this is because we believe in serving everything freshly prepared, we do not freeze pre-prepared food and reheat it and serve, which is reflected in every bite you eat at Bouffage.
We let go of the number of table rotations, and profiteering rather focused on serving one set of tables the best food which is prepared fresh and in the method that it is supposed to be prepared and served.
- What’s the most unique thing about the menu?
Where to begin?
From being the first ones to introduce hand Crafted Burgers, to serving thin crisp stone oven pizzas, to indulgent Italian fairs like our lasagna and pasta, we serve over 50 varieties of kebabs across vegetarian and non-vegetarian options, we introduced the traditional Lucknowi delicacy with Galouti kebab, the famous Kakori kebab, our Nalli Nihari has die-hard lovers which is slow-cooked for hours until it gets sticky and flavorful and completely unique!
Even our Curries that we serve The butter chicken or the cheese butter masala, our Paneer Pakeezah, Nargisi Kofta curries to Malai Kofta, everything tastes unique and enhances the Bouffaging experience.
- How’s the response from the customers?
The hard work and dedication that our team has put in are reflected by the amazing feedback we get from our patrons. I along with everyone here at Bouffage make sure to be on the floor all the time and make sure to talk to all the patrons after their meals, to take feedback, and understand their experience. We keep taking advice on how we can keep improving the experience.
This beautiful relationship of our patrons with us is reflected in the fact that we are one of the highest-rated restaurants and cafés in the city since the day we opened our gates and keep being the first choice of our patrons for food, fun, and experience!
Some people even call us the trailblazer of the city. We humbly accept the appreciation and aim to keep serving them.
- What’s next for Bouffage?
Well, the pursuit of perfect taste is never ending. We are always experimenting with new dishes, trying to introduce new and exciting meals for everyone. We aim to deliver flavors that your taste buds did not even know about. We are also moving to create the same magic with coffee as we did with food. Furthermore, we have expanded to three outlets in a span of 5 years with Bouffage Binge & Spirits which has a bar and a party lounge section, serving craft cocktails. Another outlet with a rooftop serving the same magic of great food is coming soon.
