Having lived in Mumbai my entire life, Chandigarh made me question a few things I thought were normal. Wide roads, actual greenery and enough open space to make you wonder why nobody has built a tower on it yet. The traffic follows rules, people don’t seem to be in as much of a hurry and you can actually sit somewhere without being nudged towards the exit. It took me a while to stop looking for the catch.
Maybe that is why I immediately liked The Back Room, the new cocktail bar inside The Toy Hotel in Sector 34A. It has a similar thought behind it, but without making a song and dance about it. The latest venture from Saanya and Akshay Verma of VTC Group, TBR arrives as India’s first pour-only cocktail bar.
Calling it a cocktail bar, though, undersells what is interesting about the place. The Back Room takes some of the principles that make Chandigarh work so well — structure, space, precision and consideration — and applies them to an evening out.
Start with the water. Every cocktail comes with a glass of water on the side. It sounds almost too obvious to be noteworthy, but if you are in your late twenties or early thirties, you know that drinking until four in the morning and pretending the next day does not exist is no longer the proposition it once was. Having water sitting right next to my drink felt oddly considerate.
The cocktails are equally considered. Rather than having bartenders build each drink from scratch when you order, every cocktail begins its life upstairs in the bar’s lab. This is where recipes are developed, tested and measured in grams rather than milliliters. Ingredients are prepared, pickled and experimented with before each cocktail is built, batched, rested and sealed in large-format bottles.
And if you are lucky (like me), you might get to see the lab yourself. Located on the first floor of The Toy Hotel, it looks more like a beautifully designed scientific workspace than the back room of a bar. Bottles, ingredients and equipment are laid out with a sense of order as bartenders and mixologists work through the drinks long before they reach your table.
The whole experience is remarkably easy. You can sit inside, move to the garden, order another drink, share some food and carry on talking. The service is attentive without hovering. The drinks arrive quickly. There is water. There is food. And, should you need it, a shawl (brownie points from me for this).
The menu might be the most Chandigarh-thing about TBR. In a city where you can navigate by sector number, the cocktails come with coordinates of their own. Instead of conventional names, The Back Room uses a three-digit code to tell you what you are getting. The numbers correspond to the drink’s base spirit, technique and flavour profile, turning what could have been a complicated cocktail menu into something remarkably intuitive. The city is planned around a grid; the bar has simply applied the same logic to its drinks.
The system also makes you look at a cocktail differently. Rather than being led by a clever name or elaborate description, you are essentially choosing your coordinates and discovering what is inside the glass. It is structured without feeling overly serious.
My coordinates for the evening were 511. The tequila-based cocktail combines tequila with jalapeño, coriander, cherry tomato and malic acid, and was my favourite of the lot. It hits the right note when you want something light and refreshing without veering into the predictable citrusy territory that tends to dominate that category.
The food follows a similarly easygoing philosophy. The menu is made for sharing, with plates that can be picked at between drinks and conversations rather than requiring everyone at the table to stop and focus on dinner. The Agua Chile Pani Puri is a particularly good example: a crisp puri filled with guacamole and sour cream, finished with jalapeño agua chile. It takes familiar pani puri in a decidedly different direction without losing the fun of eating one.
The Sambal-Spiced Jhol Momos are another table-friendly choice, with mushroom and cheese momos served with a spiced peanut and chilli jhol. They are substantial enough to make you feel like you have actually eaten, while still working neatly alongside the cocktails.
After a few cocktails, plenty of food and an evening that, for once, never felt rushed, I left feeling unusually full, satisfied and, most importantly, hydrated.
Chandigarh was designed around the idea that a city could make everyday life work a little better. The Back Room has probably borrowed the same philosophy for going out.