Musafir means traveller
Nobody stays in Mussoorie for very long. People have been passing through this town since the first hot season somebody decided to climb out of the plains, and they still do — up from Dehradun on a Friday, two nights, back down on Sunday. We opened on Landour Road in 2016 on the understanding that we are the stop, not the destination. That is not modesty. It decided the hours, the menu and where we put the glass.
2,005 m above sea level Open since 2016 Closed now
The room was somebody's house first
Tin roof, stone walls two feet thick, and door frames painted the same teal as every other cottage on this road. We did not choose that colour. It was already here.
The one change that mattered was taking the wall out on the valley side and putting glass in. Before that it was a dark house with a good view it could not see. Now the whole south wall is window, four tables sit against it, and in winter the sun comes in low enough by three in the afternoon that nobody wants to leave.
Everything else is more or less as we found it — the beam you have to duck under by the counter, the floor that slopes very slightly toward the door, the stove in the corner that we still light between November and March because a tin roof at this height gives back nothing at night.
Deodars first, then the valley
The cedars are the closest thing in the view and the reason the light in here is green until about ten in the morning.
Deodar is what holds this ridge together — tall, dark, slow-growing, and near enough to the glass that the lower branches move when the wind comes up the valley in the afternoon. They are also why the room smells the way it does after rain, which is a thing we have never managed to describe to anyone who has not sat here.
Past them the ground drops away toward the Doon. On a clear day you can follow the ghat road most of the way to Dehradun — 35 km by road, a long way down. On a bad day the cloud comes up over the sill by nine and the tree line disappears, and those are the better mornings for sitting still with a filter coffee and letting the bus you meant to catch go without you.
Everything worth walking to is close
Three of them start from the door. None of them needs a car, and the road up to Landour is the one we would send you on first — it is the walk this cafe was built around.
-
The old cantonment square — bun omelette and a view down the other side.
-
The ropeway station, or twenty-five minutes on foot from the Mall.
-
A flat three-kilometre loop, no traffic, the ridge on one side the whole way.
The Landour walk climbs the whole way — about forty-five minutes up if you stop, half an hour coming back. It gets you out of the town and into the deodars within ten minutes, past the old cemetery, and up to Char Dukan where four shops have been selling the same bun omelette to the same kind of person for a very long time. People come back down here for lunch. That is the pattern we plan the kitchen around.
The bakery, and what altitude does to it
The oven goes on before the road wakes up. Everything on the bakery shelf was mixed that morning, in this room, by somebody who then went and opened the front door.
Dough behaves differently at 2,005 m. There is less air pressing down on it, so it proves faster than it should and will happily over-prove while you are looking the other way; the drier air pulls water out of it at the same time. So everything here is mixed wetter than a plains recipe asks for, proved in a shorter window, and baked a little hotter. It took us the better part of a year to stop producing bricks.
Banana bread is on every day because it is forgiving and because it is what people want at eleven in the morning with a filter coffee. Cinnamon rolls come out once, early. Apple crumble turns up when the apples come through from the Chaubattia side in autumn and goes away again when they stop. When a tray is finished it is finished — the oven only holds so much, and we would rather run out than bake a second, worse batch at four in the afternoon.
Who ends up at these tables
Three kinds of people, mostly, and they arrive at three different times of day — which is the only reason a place this size can serve pancakes and momos off the same board.
Weekenders from the plains
People who moved up
The door is open from eight
Daily · 8:00 am – 9:00 pm · Landour Road, Mussoorie, Uttarakhand 248179. Come up, take the window if it is free, and stay as long as the coffee lasts.