Brunch & Cake comes to India with an outlet in Worli’s Raheja Altimus, in Mumbai, following branches in the UAE, Spain, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt.
A snaking queue, but no celebrity in sight.
The year is 2016, and Amjad Barakat and Jamal Wick (co-founders of F&B company Innovision Holding) are in Barcelona, following an unusual queue across its cobbled streets.
“There was a long line of restaurants, most of them empty. And then there’s this one specific place that had a line going all around the block. It was ridiculously long,” Barakat recalls. “We first thought it must be the theatre.”
Curiosity got the better of them, and they joined the queue. At the end of the wait, they were welcomed into a “small, cute place”, with “extremely colourful” and sumptuous dishes. They enjoyed it so much that they began to reach out to the founder, Manex Jaurrieta, to collaborate and bring the restaurant, Brunch & Cake, to the UAE, where they lived.
Easier said than done—Jaurrieta was a surfer first, entrepreneur next, and away from work to surf for nine months of the year. It took a year and a half of persistence to get that meeting, and finally, they struck a deal to bring Brunch and Cake not just to Dubai, but to the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) region as a whole.
Amjad Barakat, co-Founder and CEO of Global Restaurants & Brunch & Cake; Hitesh Keswani, managing director, Aspect Hospitality India.
“We didn’t know how popular it was when we started, because Barcelona isn’t a main city like Paris or London,” Barakat says. “The Barcelona menu mainly had breakfast and brunch options, and we upgraded the menu to suit the all-day dining culture of the GCC, made the design a bit more upscale.”
They opened first with a 65-70 seater in Dubai, and received about 120 guests on the first day, about 180 on the second, and a staggering 1,000 people on the third. “We had a two-hour queue, we couldn’t cope with it,” he recalls. “We realised that there was huge demand for it.”
Since then, they opened multiple outlets across the region, and had the ambition to expand beyond the GCC. However, Jaurrieta was no longer interested—he was looking to move to Bali full-time.Also read: The future of food lies in your grandma’s cuisine: Virgilio Martinez of Central
In a rare ‘reverse acquisition’, Innovision Holding, originally the franchisee, bought the global brand of Brunch & Cake from its founder in 2021, and since then, has been focussed on an expansion drive.
India is next on its cards, with a 65-seater outlet in Worli; coming up soon are seven more units in Spain, another in Greece, and an entry into Azerbaijan. “The Mumbai outlet is number 19, and 34 more are in development,” Barakat says.
India calling
The Indian operations are in partnership with Aspect Hospitality, which currently has brought international brands including Akina and Opa to Mumbai, and plans to bring Japanese-Peruvian fine-dine chain SushiSamba to Indian shores in the near future.
Aspect Hospitality has a current turnover of Rs 120 crore, and aims to expand from 15 to 65 outlets across India within the next 12 months, with projected revenues of Rs 200 crore in 2025 and Rs 350 crore by 2026.
“I travel to Dubai quite often, and I still remember my first Brunch & Cake experience,” says Hitesh Keswani, managing director, Aspect Hospitality India. “There was a long queue, like in Barcelona, but once you were in—from the welcoming staff to the food aesthetic and large portions of comfort food, it’s all so vibrant and cosy. We think the food is very palatable to Indians too.”
“In India, lately, I feel like we’ve had a lot of restaurants and cafes where the vibe is great, but the food is a mess,” he adds. “Brunch & Cake serves both, and you could visit multiple times, from breakfast to dinner, and even drinks.”
Not all Brunch & Cake outlets serve alcohol, but Keswani is hoping to make it available across Indian locations. In Worli, the luxe wicker-and-linen adorned café is meant to invoke feelings of comfort and charm, with Instagram-friendly spaces. It’s stationed in a glass office building, and therefore, the alcohol menu could lend itself to post-work drinks.
The menu features comfort all-day dining options, and an extensive vegetarian list created especially for India
The Mumbai menu has about 70 percent vegetarian fare—a first for the brand. The chain’s core philosophy is ‘grandma’s goodness’, and the menu, then, has comfort food including elevated forms of eggs, avocado toast, pancakes, cheesecake, and pizza made in a stone oven on site.
Next on the list is an outlet in Delhi, then one more in Mumbai (“preferably in an area like BKC”). Brunch & Cake is then looking to open doors in Hyderabad, Bengaluru and a beachside family experience in Goa.
“Normally, people love to go first to the flagship cities—Miami, New York, London—but our experience has shown the opposite,” says Barakat. “Our most successful Brunch & Cake in terms of revenue has been Bahrain. Egypt has had incredible traffic. So what we’ve learnt is, we don’t want to go to London at this point—we want to explore emerging economies, and have an early-mover advantage.”