Taking the slow lane in Mysuru

Mysuru's pace is drawing those seeking to escape the rush of large cities, and its conscious café culture reflects the space it gives people to pour themselves into a slow and creative life

- Tara Das

Maresh Subramaniam, 41, founder of Vui Coffee Roasters, jots the temperature of a batch of coffee beans every half a minute for 13 minutes in a small notebook. "Great coffee is high attention work," he says.

Prathvi Agarwal, 32, in his solo-run bakery, Khameeri Sourdough Microbakery, says you must knead sourdough until "you become one with the dough".

Prathiksha Prahallad, 27, of Leaven café is deeply influenced by the Kannada recipes from a baking certification her grandmother acquired over six decades ago. Getting it right matters so much, she's even eaten scraps off a plate that a customer hadn't finished to test if something was wrong with it.

In the post covid-19 pandemic years, Mysuru has seen a new bakes and brews culture, brought about by patissiers, baristas, chefs, and roast-masters for whom the process is individualistic, creative and skill-based. It is also deeply personal. As the world speeds up and scales up, Mysuru is slowing it all down and doing it by hand. Whether it's coffee, cocoa or bread, slow process skills have value here.

Mysuru is a uniquely multicultural microcosm. Yoga centres attract a multicultural foreign crowd, who along with the visiting Indians from other cities keep the market for a variety of food vibrant. The Bengaluru tech brewery-hopping crowd comes to Mysuru, three hours away by the new expressway, to café-hop. From Madikeri come coffee planters, Tibetans, and tourists dropping into the nearest city.

This floating population is not always loyal, but Mysuru has always been a retirement-friendly city. Dina Weber, 31, founder of bakery SAPA, points out that many of her initial customers included repatriates from overseas who missed good breads. Thus, here, the local anchors the culture as opposed to a Goan or Himachali hot spot, which is about the romance of influx and transience.