Around Town : Here’s why Viraj Ghelani and Palak Khimavat chose Kandivali and not Bandra to launch Slow, their new cafe and bakehouse

The design of the cafe mirrors SLOW’s ethos — warm, understated and earthy, with grey walls, wooden tabletops and chairs upholstered in muted tones, while colour comes through the food, drinks and plants.

The name was Khimavat’s idea, while the logo was designed by visual artist Too Sid, a friend of Ghelani’s. “He didn’t charge me a penny,” he said, adding that the artist’s favourite coffee has since found its way onto the menu, named after him.

For Khimavat, SLOW feels like a natural progression of a journey that began in 2018, when she launched The Messy House – Dessert Bar & Cafe. She was all set to study at the Culinary Institute of America when the pandemic disrupted those plans. “This was always the dream,” she said.

Ghelani’s leap into the food business, on the other hand, came from instinct, and appetite. “I’ve been eating the food she makes for years and I crave it. I knew what the world was missing,” he said. “I can’t eat any other cake today — not because she’s my wife, but because it’s really that good. I thought, why not make the most of the opportunity that’s already in my house?”

Content creator-actor Viraj Ghelani and his wife, Palak Khimavat, a self-taught chef and baker are the founder of SLOW, a bakehouse and cafe in Kandivali.

The 1,500 sqft cafe is housed inside a three-storey residential building in Mahavir Nagar, Kandivali West, and comfortably seats about 40 people across a mix of solo seating, group arrangements and community tables. Designed by Khimavat’s sister-in-law Kinjal Goradia of A+iD, the space mirrors the cafe’s ethos — warm, understated and earthy, with grey walls, wooden tabletops and chairs upholstered in muted tones, while colour comes through the food, drinks and plants.

The food and drinks programme is helmed entirely by Khimavat. While baking has long been her forte, she has spent the last two years learning the nuances of coffee, working with matcha, and fine-tuning the savoury menu. The result is a compact offering that leans firmly into comfort food.

Keen on ingredient sourcing

“It’s food you can keep coming back to,” said Ghelani, pointing to dishes like mac and cheese and a gochujang noodle bowl. Desserts here are an extension of Khimavat’s earlier venture, Healthy Mess, with an emphasis on jaggery, coconut sugar and natural sweetness derived from fruits and chocolate.

Udon noodles, mushroom toast and chocolate cake at SLOW.

The cafe is equally particular about ingredient sourcing — milk from Pride of Cows, cheese delivered daily from a Gujarat-based farm — while completely avoiding refined sugar and flour. Pastas are made using semolina, noodles are udon, and, as Khimavat puts it simply, “Everything is made fresh.”

This writer sampled the warm, gooey skillet cookie, a rich hot chocolate made using 55 per cent dark, home-grown cocoa, and a creamy tofu and tomato toastie. The coffee programme — currently driving a large share of the cafe’s sales — features Aeropress, pourovers and cold brews alongside regular espresso-based drinks.

With Ghelani at the helm, interest was inevitable. On opening day alone, the cafe saw around 750 visitors. “It’s been over a month now. The hype has worn off, but people are still coming,” he said. “There’s always a fear that tomorrow there won’t be as many people — but there are, and that excites me every time.”

Why Kandivali?

Choosing Kandivali over a more obvious neighbourhood like Bandra was deliberate. “We wanted people to come to this side of the city — Malad, Kandivali, Borivali,” said Ghelani. “We barely have one or two good cafes here. We want to make this the new ‘It’ pocket.”

Running a food business, they admit, is far from easy. “We’re here every day from afternoon till about 1.30 am. It’s a thankless job,” said Ghelani. Khimavat agreed. “No matter how much you plan, there’s a new crisis every day,” she said, who was earlier on a call trying to find a technician to fix a machine that unexpectedly broke a day ago.

They are already thinking ahead. From March, the cafe plans to run two shifts, opening at 9 am and staying open until midnight (it currently operates from 2 pm to 11 pm). There are more ventures in the pipeline, Khimavat hinted, choosing her words carefully. “But,” she said, “there will only ever be one SLOW.”