As you walk up the escalator to the third floor of Ambience Mall in Gurugram, a bright, colourful board with the name ‘Harajuku Tokyo Cafe’ welcomes you. As you go closer, you see several cozy little pockets featuring fun elements such as sakura (cherry blossom) trees, handmade terrazzo flooring, manga comics, a Japanese street mural, a live baking station and a claw machine that immediately transports you to the streets of Harajuku in Japan.

For those uninitiated, Harajuku is a district in Tokyo known internationally as a centre of Japanese youth culture and fashion. Complete with neon lighting and Instagram-worthy art installations, the cafe in Ambience Mall gives you a ride through Harajuku.

People in India normally associate Japanese cuisine with fine-dining and high-end restaurants. However, all that is changing now—slowly but steadily. Recently, Harajuku Tokyo Café, a Japan-inspired QSR brand, opened its second outlet in Delhi-NCR at Ambience Mall in Gurugram. The ‘bakery café’s’ first outlet at Select City Walk in Delhi is already quite popular for offering Japanese cuisine in a new avatar and without blowing a hole in the wallet.

Indian diners were sceptical about trying authentic Japanese cuisine, especially since dishes such as sushi have been associated with raw fish. They were also not so palatable or accessible to Indians, being mostly served in expensive restaurants and five-star hotels. “However, that perception in general has started to change with a rise in the popularity of modern Japanese cuisine. With the introduction of different ingredients in sushi, especially vegetarian ones, the interest in this Japanese dish among Indians has been quite phenomenal,” says Gaurav Kanwar, the founder of Harajuku Tokyo Cafe.

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