Years of living overseas leaves a short list of things you miss. Ours kept coming back to one item.
In most of Northern Europe and in Australia, the cinnamon scroll is not a dessert. It sits on the counter next to the coffee, it costs about the same as the coffee, and people eat one at eleven in the morning without treating it as an occasion. In Sweden there is a word for the act of stopping to have one — fika — and it describes a pause rather than a pudding.
What came to India instead was the American version. Large, iced heavily with cream-cheese frosting, sweet enough that one is plenty, sold in shopping centres as a treat. A good thing, but a different thing — and for years it was the only version you could find here.
So Grata bakes the other one. Smaller, bread-forward, only lightly sweet, finished after baking rather than drowned before it. Six sweet finishes, from the plain Classic at ₹209 up to Pistachio and Biscoff at ₹279.
Once you are working with a dough that is barely sweet to begin with, an obvious question appears: what happens if you stop adding sugar altogether? The answer is that the scroll stops being a pastry and becomes a small, spiral loaf that carries tomato and cheese the way a focaccia does.
That is where the Marinara and Pesto scrolls came from, at ₹249 each. They are the part of the menu we are most attached to and, as far as we can find, the part almost nobody else in India is making. The longer argument for them is here.
Nobody eats one thing, so the counter also carries twelve ciabatta sandwiches, two focaccia, three bagels, four cheesecakes, the bakes and eight drinks. All of it is held to the same standard, and all of it lists calories, macros and allergens because that is simply what a customer is owed.
But the scroll is the thing we would like to be known for. It is better to be known for one thing than adequate at everything.
Grata Bakehouse was started by a team who spent years living overseas and came back wanting one thing they could not find properly in Delhi NCR — the European-style cinnamon scroll. The café is at Shop SF-098, First Floor, DLF Galleria, Gurugram, and is operated by Rawnest Private Limited.
Grata is Latin for pleasing, welcome and thankful. It was chosen for what it means rather than for what it describes — a name about how a place should feel, not about what is sold in it.