Hauz Khas Village: A Stop to Stroll, Chat, Shop

Hauz Khas Village is a fashion hub in the morning and a food hub at night that attracts expat crowd. Hauz Khas Village remains a creative hub, in every possible way.

               

     

 In Hauz Khas Village, the creative inclination co-exists with the commercial interest, and mainstream taste mixes with alternative.

Even by the late 1980s, the village had more than 40 designer stores and a few restaurants catering to a foreign clientele.

At the moment, this quaint urban village is a narrow street lined with expensive boutiques, art galleries and well thought-out antique shops. There are a number of reasonably priced cafes to grab a bite and some good restaurants to dine at. The place has seen many a new restaurants coming up; Lah, Golconda Bowl, Yeti, Elma’s Tea Room and Thadi to name a few.

Kunzum Cafe is a welcome change in the city that harbours air-conditioned pretentiousness in the form of cafes, lounges and restaurants. The cafe, better known as the travel cafe, is owned by Ajay Jain, a traveller, photographer and writer. The walls are decked up with his photographs taken across Ladakh, Nepal, Assam, Kashmir, Uttarakhand and Rajasthan, ranging from 2000 Rs to 25000 Rs. The book racks placed beside the walls are stacked up with travel magazines and comics. The bulletin board on a wall is an eye-catcher, as it has notes and messages scribbled on chits from travellers and the Delhi crowd, pinned up in a nonchalant fashion. Besides the free Wi-Fi, you are also free to plug your iPod into the café’s music player. When you exit after many a mug of Coorgi coffee, there is a wooden box that humbly says: "Pay what you want."

                

 “Places like Shahpur Jat and Mehrauli haven’t developed like this because they are too spread out geographically and fragmented. Hauz Khas Village, on the other hand, is compact. It lends itself better as a market,” Ajay Jain says.

Elma's, owned by Shelly Sahay, of Le Cordon Bleu, a renowned London Culinary Arts School in the United Kingdom, is an old-fashioned English bakery, cake shop and tea room in the heart of Hauz Khas Village. The breads are baked fresh everyday and the cakes, tarts and pies are baked with the homemade appeal. The place remains packed with people with a sweet tooth and those who love an organized, no clutter yet creative retreat from the usual places.

 

Thadi is another restaurant set up not on the main road of the village but inside a building that requires one to climb up a flight of umpteen stairs leading to the top floor. The owner along with few of his friends who studied engineering in Rajasthan always dreamt of setting up a place like the roadside shacks where travellers and others came to drink chai or eat whatever the owner can dish up in 5 minutes and most importantly, talk. That is how Thadi materialized. The ambience is chilled out and unpretentious; the visitors can sit outside on the moodas in the balcony overlooking the lake at the deer park or can sit inside on the simple, colourful couches.

 

 Another interesting place that could be explored and devoured by the eyes of tourists and the lovers of antiques alike is Khazana India, owned by a collector who decided to put up the items for sale, eventually. It has an impressive collector’s edition of goods ranging from home decor to jewellery. Being in business since 1950, their esteemed Customers include large organizations like Target, Walmart, Marshalls, Pier 1 Imports, and TIC to small individual art and fashion shops. 

 

Maati- India made by hand, is a small artefacts shop at the beginning of the street. The interesting doodles on the walls along with the Dokra craft (Chhattisgarh) door knobs would lead you inside where products ranging from hand painted t-shirts to well-framed traditional paintings, antique jewellery and clutches welcome you to Maati. In its quest for classical art forms, Team Maati travels to the remotest areas of India in search of artisans practising varied art forms who lack support to earn a living through their legacy of traditional art forms. They are also trained and provided with medical and educational assistance.

 

Many art galleries such as Creativity Art Gallery, Art Elements and Rang Art Gallery feature illustrations and paintings of Comic Art, Contemporary Art, Abstract Art, Realistic Art, Classical Art, Tanjore Art and others from the upcoming as well as India's most renowned Artists. The curator of the gallery Mr Kapil says that "Art has deeply significant role to play in communication". He adds, “It can interpret scientific concepts and the social changes they bring.”

 

The village also has a deer park and ends in medieval ruins with a beautiful reservoir, from which the area gets its name. Hauz Khas means Royal Tank which was built by Feroze Shah Tughlaq, a 14^th century ruler.

 And just when we think that we are done with discovering the nuances of the place, we are bound to spot a new board being put up.