Meet Harsh Surti, founder, Cafes of India, an Instagram page dedicated to Instagrammable cafes and restaurants of India. Someone has rightly said that behind every successful man is a woman and Harsh is no exception. The idea of starting this page happen to Harsh when he met his date in 2019. Harsh elaborates, “We meet at The Grammar Room and then following the next three days we did café hopping in Delhi. On her next visit to Delhi, we again met at The Grammar Room and that was the day when we decided to start the page ‘Cafes of India’, so that people can get to know everything about types of cafes in and around.” “The idea came to us because we had to invest a lot of time in deciding the right place that offers a good view and delectable food too,” adds Harsh, who is basically from Valsad in Gujarat and runs his father’s business of uniform manufacturing for government schools.
Harsh always wanted to do things differently and that’s why he left his diploma in mechanical engineering at the age of 19 and decided to join his family business. Harsh says, “Travelling and meeting new people gives me joy, and Cafes of India has helped me live that dream.” Till date Harsh has covered more than 150 cafes in 10 cities.
For Harsh, it has been a roller coaster ride with hiccups of 2 lockdowns, but he took it in his stride and used the time to grow his Instagram page. He states, “My family business was on hold due to pandemic and I was unable to step out, due to lockdown, so to keep myself sane and sorted, I decided to use the time to grow my page and I guess the strategic planning worked and now we get 5-7 invites every day via Instagram. It makes me feel happy. Today, we are a family of 51.K followers.”
Towards the end of 2020, Harsh planned a trip to Delhi with an itinerary of visiting 6-8 cafes in 3 days. And that was the time; when he got to know the ground reality that Cafes of India had made a mark in the market. He shares, “In 3 days, I ended up visiting 14-15 cafes In Delhi/NCR because people somehow got to know that I am in town and the café owners/communication teams invited me to pay a visit.”
When we talk about the virtual world, plagiarism is a part of the process and you cannot neglect it. Harsh feels that instead of paying any heed to it, it better is to push your own envelope. He informs, “There are a couple of pages on the lines of Cafes of India, and earlier it used to disturb me that why people are copying me, but now I have understood that it’s a sign that you are growing and I would rather push myself to do something more innovative on the page, than wasting my time in chasing such people.”
Harsh’s motive behind opening this page is to bring like-minded people together and he came one step closer to it in October 2021, when he organized ‘Kaafi Coffee’, an event dedicated to coffee entrepreneurs and coffee loves at K’s Verandah in Surat. He informs, “The idea was to bring together all the competitors and coffee lovers under one roof and explore the opportunities and scopes to make the coffee experience better in the city.”
Harsh believes that you make good friends when you are travelling, and when you travel with like-minded people, you learn a lot and make life-long memories. Ask him about future plans for Cafes of India, the 27-year-old concludes, “I want to do café hopping with like-minded people in different cities and may be different countries too, where we will talk about food, feel, architecture and much more beyond the set standards of the society.”
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