Vidhi Shah Is Making The World Kinder With Her Imagine Cafe

25 year old Mumbai-based Vidhi Shah is an architect with Marathon Realty. A certified foodie, her weekends often consisted of trying out new places to eat at in Mumbai which had made her quite the Zomato star next door.

A Lifestyle Change<h2>

Six months ago, she decided to make a serious lifestyle change and turn vegan. Her inspiration came from her colleague and best friend Ritwik Roy, a hardcore Bengali non-vegetarian who had suddenly turned vegan a year and a half ago.

“I am a Gujarati Jain and a proud vegetarian by birth. I never used leather products even before I turned vegan. The roots of compassion were always there within me but I always turned a blind eye towards the atrocities in the dairy industry and always consoled myself by thinking that being vegetarian, I was doing enough good. But then Ritwik slowly started throwing facts about the dairy industry at me and planted the seeds of my decision to turn vegan.” she explains.

The duo had just completed an important architectural project together when Ritwik decided to take a month off and try his hand at vegan cooking. Since he hadn’t eaten dairy for over a year, he’d call Vidhi for tasting assistance. She’d send him back to the drawing board with her feedback over and over again till they successfully made the perfect vegan cheese.  

"The only reason I’d been choosing to ignore the atrocities of the dairy industry was because I loved my cheese, butter, paneer and chocolate very much. But now I knew that I could have guilt-free versions of all these things which were way healthier for me as well our environment.

We slowly figured out cheese, cheese sauce, mayonnaise, butter and then started cooking with these core ingredients. I signed up for Veganuary 2018 and let me tell you I had the most foodgasmic January of my whole life. Everyday we would cook a dish and eat it all by ourselves. I probably must be the first person to gain 5kgs in the first month of turning vegan!” she laughs.

There was no looking back for her and she turned completely vegan.

From being a vegan to owning a vegan café<h2>

Vidhi soon realised that it was very hard to find vegan delivery options. “There’s only so much triple Schezwan rice you can eat.” she says.

Empathetic to the plight of many fellow vegans probably facing the same ordeal, the two had the idea of opening their own vegan café.

"It has always been my dream - retirement plan actually - to open a quaint cosy cafe - and now it was seeming more and more important to open one. From personal experience, I  knew lecturing wouldn't make people turn vegans - Only good food will. The reassurance that I won't have to give up on those cheese, paneer or chocolate or even meat cravings will convince people and give them the willpower to try and go vegan. Slowly we started calling our friends over to taste the food and give feedback. Their feedback gave us a lot of encouragement.”

Motivated by their friends’ feedback and a desire to make the world a little kinder to animals, Vidhi knew it was time to take the plunge.

“I am an odd Gujarati because I hate businesses. I really love my present job and was very happy with it. But this cafe was now no more a dream or retirement plan but a necessity for both of us. So we decided to build a business model mainly to figure out how much investment it would take, etc. while working on our present jobs. We told a broker to look out for available shops in a particular complex in Mulund since it was really close to our place of stay and work.

When the broker got back to us we came to know that there were only 4 shops left to be leased out in the entire complex with around 150 shops. This was when we knew we cannot just keep messing around in our kitchen any more - If we want to do it, we have to do it NOW. And that's it, we did not overthink it. We chose the shop and paid the token. I think it was around 4-5 days time between the broker getting back to us and us paying the token. Once we started thinking, and planning and getting scared we had already paid the token for the space and now there was no going back, just moving ahead.” she smiles.