The Cacao Mill by Subko

Hot chocolate steamed in front of you

The hot chocolate is steamed at the counter while you watch, which is the most direct way into what this place does with Indian cacao. The Cacao Mill is Subko’s Colaba expression of a shift from specialty coffee into the cacao crop, framed as Mumbai’s first chocolate factory and working as café, retail space and production-led tasting room at once. Founder Rahul Reddy pushed the 2023 cacao expansion on the grounds that Indian cacao is phenomenally underrated.

The drinks and bakes all pull on that thread. Cacao shell tea tonic and cold brews on tap sit beside the chocolate work; the Kashmiri Walnut Chocolate Chip Cookie Bar, the Podi Almond Bar and The Kulfi Bar carry it into the bakehouse; and chocolate and brie sourdough toasts with melted Subko cacao take it savoury. Pain au chocolat experiments and Subko mousses fill the space between.

Pod to bar, inside an old textile factory

The building was a textile factory, then an art gallery, and is now a chocolate-making venue in Colaba. Skylights open up spacious, minimalist interiors, and a cacao plant sits at the heart of the operation rather than in a display case.

On the ground floor, The Cellar is a temperature-controlled room for craft chocolate, and the production area puts raw cacao fruit, beans and the chocolate-making itself in front of guests. A trained team member can lead a tasting through raw cacao fruit, cacao juice, beans, butter and powder while explaining terroir, fermentation, drying and processing. The mezzanine is where you sit with craft bakes and specialty coffee.

Order cacao first, then the coffee

Start with the hot chocolate. For something lighter or sharper, the cacao shell tea tonic uses the part of the crop most producers discard, and cold brew is on tap. The chocolate range runs past bars to single-origin cubes modelled on industrial candy bars and filled tablets reworked through an Indian lens, including a kulfi-inspired white chocolate bar. Mousses use homegrown Indian gin, thirty-nine per cent white chocolate and seventy per cent dark, finished with sesame or peanut tuiles.

The coffee is no afterthought. Three Mythos One grinders, a Slayer espresso machine and Modbar technology run the Subko Bloom Bar, with two Modbar pour-over units plus an Origami Dripper and Kalita Wave for hand brewing, all pointed at single-origin South Asian coffee. On food, follow whatever pulls cacao into the bake: the chocolate and brie sourdough toast is the savoury-leaning order, while croissants, technically demanding sourdough and cookie bars keep the visit close to the bakehouse core.