Backpackers Café

by The Balloon

We thought Delhi heat had something epic to it, and after taking it for enough days to proclaim ourselves heroes, we decided to leave for a June field trip to Chandigarh. We left the forty something degrees of the Capital City, turned on the Punjabi tunes, and drove for a few hours on the highway, then got to Le Corbusier's city and discovered the temperature was a couple of degrees higher than what we left behind. There we were: the well planned city was a desert. The sky was blue over us and, from inside our air conditioned car, it looked like a nice, sunny, somewhat fresh springtime day. But it was enough to roll down the car window for a second to realize that there were at least a couple of suns shining over the city. And heating up. We were driving in an oven.

So, although the city is known to offer some of the best butter chicken you'll ever have, we decided it was better to stoically resist the call of Punjabi food and go for something a bit lighter. Which is not the easiest thing to find in the city, but in Sector 9 we achieved our goal, scoring a table inside Backpackers Café and a parking spot right in front of the entrance of the place.

Never mind the tricky name, Backpackers Café is not a backpackers' place. It's a colorful, neat, small café that offers a long and intricate menu of different cuisine. Longer and more intricate than  we expected: several pages of a newspaper-looking list of all sorts of food entertained us with pictures, bizarre pieces of information and interactive games, and getting through it was quite a task (when the waiter came to collect our orders the first, we didn't have a clue of what we wanted, although we had learned a couple of oddities).

Challenging menu aside, the place is a good bet if you are looking for a honest salad or some genuine café food. They serve tempting breakfast all day, with fresh and tasty choices, from fruit salads to pancakes with whipped cream. And if you like bacon, you won't be disappointed. Portions are generous, especially for mains, so you might want to share them. Stay away from the mozzarella and tomato crêpes: not only do they have unannounced mushrooms inside, but they are hugely disappointing. But go ahead for shakes and desserts: if you're full, the place sells them to go.

So, in the heat of June in Candigarh, we managed to save our stomach from a gravy heavy (and truly delicious!) meal at Backpackers Café, although we didn't end up leaving quite as light as we wanted: spoilt with choices, we ended up over-ordering. And happily over-eating.

One last thing: if available, try to get a table next to the bookshelf: you can entertain yourself going through one of the books, or, even better, checking out the cars' and motorbikes' miniatures that, for obscure reasons, decorate the shelves. We still wonder why exactly they're there.