Every once in a while, a place comes along that rewrites the rules of the game. Chef Vanshika Bhatia’s plant-forward OMO Café in Gurugram is all about healthy food made with local, seasonal ingredients; and there’s some very good coffee.
An alumni of Le Cordon Bleu, Chef Vanshika Bhatia has gone from success to success, displaying a deep understanding of ingredients and an intuitive skill when it comes to creating new dishes. More recently, the versatile chef made waves with Petite Pie Shop, Doggy Style (a hot-dog delivery service), and now OMO Café, a health-food café which also nurtures two gourmet brands under the same roof: Wild & Raw, a boutique green bar serving fresh salads, juices and desserts and Ngarum, an artisanal coffee bar serving coffee from Nagaland.
Chef Vanshika’s brief was to create a plant-forward, non-Indian menu using only local ingredients. The result is not only an imaginative menu which draws on dishes and techniques from everywhere — there is also a firm focus on keeping it healthy, starting from the ingredients to the cooking techniques and even the portions.
As a restaurant, OMO is conscious of its impact on the environment. For example, it uses millets in its preparations which are actually good for the soil when grown in it.
The name, OMO, is derived from the three pillars of their belief system:
Original ingredients sourced from the farms
Maternal nourishment in every morsel
Omniscience about the botanical world
For Chef Vanshika, the draw was an opportunity to cook with vegetables, something she loves doing. It’s also challenging to make vegetables interesting or cook them in new ways — meats are relatively easier to make appealing. Having tasted the food at OMO, I can safely say that Chef Vanshika is more than equal to the challenge.
The 100 percent vegetarian kitchen serves fresh cooked food without any preservatives, artificial flavourings and/or colouring.
OMO also works closely with its suppliers to ethically source produce. This is a nearly zero-waste kitchen. The pulp left over from juicing finds its way into delicious cookies which are served with the coffee, for instance.
Chef Vanshika doesn’t’ like to pick favourites, but some of the dishes on the menu which stood out for me include the pineapple and chilli ceviche, Naga chilli cauliflower, green pea orsotto, pumpkin and ricotta gnocchi, and the buttermilk beignets from the desserts section. The coffee from Nagaland, which OMO processes from the raw bean stage, was excellent.
Address: OMO: Soul Food Community, R-004, 2nd Floor, DLF Galleria Market, DLF Phase-IV, Gurugram, Haryana 122002
Overall rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (Max: 5 stars)
Food: 9/10
Service: 8/10
Interiors/Décor: 8/10
Vibe: 8/10
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