A roof made of terracotta
Carved wooden pillars, clay tile beams and jaali fretwork — the room is built like a courtyard house, three floors above 17th Cross.
Our Story
A garden three floors up
Silaa began as a simple argument with the city: that you should not have to leave Bengaluru to sit under a tiled roof, in the green, with something hot in front of you.
So we built one indoors. Carved pillars, clay tiles, jaali screens and a rain curtain that runs all evening. Then we filled every ledge with plants until the walls stopped looking like walls.
The kitchen went west to the coast. Sorak and xacuti, caldin and feijoada, poi to mop them up, sol kadi to finish — the Goan table, cooked entirely vegetarian. Around it sits everything else Bengaluru actually eats on a weeknight: rice bowls, pasta, a long list of coffee. When the rain comes, the Karnataka specials come with it.
And most evenings, somebody plays. That is the part we did not plan and would not now give up. An Indianised jamming café — it started as a description and turned into the whole point.
The room
Six things people photograph.
Floor seating, properly
Low tables and thick cushions. Shoes off, legs crossed, a whole evening spent in one spot.
A wall of water
A rain curtain runs the length of the mezzanine, falling past the planted trough. It is the loudest quiet thing in the room.
Two hundred pots, give or take
Lit shelves stacked with plants in ceramic, brass and terracotta. The garden is not outside — it is the walls.
The gramophone corner
A brass horn, a gilt mirror, two green candlesticks. Nobody can explain it. Everybody photographs it.
Books, if you'd rather
A shelf by the counter. Nobody minds how long you stay with one.