The ‘time cafe’ in Kalamaserry, Kochi
| Photograph Credit score: SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
GVQ Time Cafe in Kalamassery, Kochi, is the sort of place that makes you marvel how way more stunning the beautiful white-and-sage inexperienced café that sits on the high of a shady slope may get when it rains. We’re sitting on the glass-roofed patio underneath a cover of timber like the remainder of GVQ. “It’s stunning!” Aathira Mohan assures me. That is her and her enterprise accomplice, Allen Ok Kurian’s pandemic undertaking.
The idea of a time café is a primary for Kochi. It derives from the anti-café motion, which began in Europe. Clients pay for the time they spend in these cafes additionally known as pay-per-minute cafés. So, at GVQ, you pay ₹150 for the primary hour and pay ₹1 per minute for the time you spend there with free, limitless drinks and snacks — black or inexperienced tea, black espresso, chilled black espresso, cookies and crepe — thrown in. There aren’t any clocks or timers to maintain monitor of the time a buyer spends there. The clock begins ticking after they order/select their limitless beverage.
Aathira Mohan and Allen Ok Kurian on the guide nook on the ‘time cafe’
| Photograph Credit score:
SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
The menu contains sandwiches, omelettes, brief eats — French fries, potato wedges and hen nuggets, whereas the drinks are iced teas and chilly espresso. Chocolate cookies and chocolate brownies make the dessert menu. The most costly merchandise on the menu is for ₹199.
The duo has not gone overboard with the menu because the focus is on the house. “We needed to maintain it easy,” Aathira says of the menu. What actually units GVQ aside is that one can take their very own meals, or order it on-line and have it delivered. No questions requested. “We are going to even plate it, heat it and serve it for you. This works for the calorie-watchers who would need to drop in at a café however perhaps not eat there since they could be on a food plan,” she provides.
That is Aathira’s dream café, or “the mixing of the most effective components of a café in a single.” The café is the results of a number of months of analysis, the entire time was spent in cafés across the metropolis. She even tried to work in a single with a view to perceive how a café works. This concept was born when considered one of her mates made a random, wishful remark.
“He mentioned how good it could be if there was a café the place they might simply hang around with out the strain of getting to order or to go away in the event that they didn’t need extra meals.” And that was the lightbulb second. The Economics graduate who runs a media manufacturing firm designed the café.
GVQ (jeevikku, which suggests to stay) has been three years within the making from idea to now. It’s exhausting to consider that the situation was, as Aathira describes it, a ‘dump yard’. What units the café aside is the ample house round it as effectively. There’s a herb or vegetable backyard, the saplings planted in a neat circle. The produce from right here can be used within the kitchen. The property has a number of timber, none of which was lower to create space for the café, Aathira reveals.
Some would contemplate Kalamaserry, a suburb, an unconventional option to open a café given its distance from the guts of town. “Issues are altering, there’s a lot occurring on this facet of city too. Plus Kalamaserry is well-connected, because the Metro station can be shut by.”
