City Food – The Germany Bakery Is Not Shutting Down, Appetite, Paharganj
The new life of a sweet landmark.
[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]
Can a hyperlocal blog change the world?
Hah.
Such a blogsite—umm, website, actually—can at least stop the approaching closure of a beloved bakery.
The Delhi Walla website will complete 10th anniversary next year in 2017 with the happy satisfaction of being the principal instrument of giving a new life to the much-loved almond honey cake of Appetite German Bakery in the backpackers’ district of Paharganj.
In July 2016, I broke the heart of the world in the following story here (an excerpt):
It’s shutting down. “The bakery is not giving us good business,” says Muhammed Farid Alam, the café’s manager. “Frankly, we are not good at it.”… The Delhi Walla doesn’t agree. I have been coming to the German Bakery for years and the visit here is never truly complete without having a glass of honey-ginger-lemon tea with a slice of their crumbly almond cake…I have also often seen others customers at the Appetite happily treating themselves to cakes, croissants and cinnamon rolls…. Waving his arm towards the bakery counter, the manager, however, says, “We don’t offer many choices there. The customers, taken in by our café’s name, enter imagining a variety of bakery items, which they don’t find inside, and then they promptly leave feeling disappointed.”
A few weeks after publishing this dispatch on the pages of this website, I again dropped by at Appetite. The bakery counter was still there with all the cakes: apple pie, chocolate cake, apple honey cake, choco rolls, cheese cake, and almond honey cake.
“A lot of new people came to our bakery over a number of days saying that they saw the news of its closure on The Delhi Walla,” said the sheepish-looking café’s manager. “Many of them urged us not to close it… we then deliberated with our owner and finally decided that this bakery is the heritage of our restaurant… we shall continue to serve cakes.”
A few minutes later, a foreign customer entered the café, took up a window-side seat, examined the yellow menu for a long time, and finally ordered a slice of almond honey cake.
The immortal life of the cakes
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happy to know you helped to save the life of this place….
Thant’s very kind of you to say so, Rachel.