“The late MF Husain used to come to our shop almost every other day, at 10:45 am, because our patties used to come out hot from the oven at 11 am—and he knew and wanted that.”
You’re probably guessing a clutch of iconic Delhi bakeries at this point, so it’ll be no surprise that I’m at Wenger’s—a bakery so iconic that it is entrenched in Delhi’s core fabric. Speaking with me is Aman Tandon, the third-generation co-owner of this family-run bakery, who speaks about what it means to have a century-old restaurant that needs no introduction—and yet, has had its own fair share of struggles in the past.
Wenger’s today is 102 years old. There are some places in Delhi that you visit for what they serve, and others that you visit for what they remember. Wenger’s belongs firmly to the latter category.
A hundred years is a difficult thing to comprehend in a city like Delhi. This is a city that has been built, dismantled, rebuilt and reinvented several times over. Addresses have changed names, buildings have disappeared, neighbourhoods have acquired new identities, and entire generations have grown up with an entirely different idea of what Delhi tastes like. And yet, in the middle of Connaught Place, Wenger’s has continued to open its doors.
In fact, Tandon shows me a brief note that he’s prepared about Wenger’s that it is, in fact, the oldest running restaurant in Connaught Place, even though it only moved here from Kashmere Gate some time in the late 1920s, or early 1930s. The Swiss couple of Mr and Mrs Wenger, who sold their shop to the Tandon family in 1926 to run a different bakery and tea room, may never have imagined the course that their eponymous store would take.
Being the city’s diary
After having run restaurants in other cities (namely Simla), liquor vending and ice cream manufacturing businesses, and catering operations for embassies, the Tandon family shut most of those expansion efforts down between the ’60s and ’70s. Wenger’s, interestingly, survived everything—standing as a witness to Delhi’s myriad chapters of history. It has, in fact, lived through Nehru’s 1947 midnight-hour speech, and even Manmohan Singh’s liberalisation budget that gave wings for India’s restaurants to be what they are today.
Tandon tells me that this art of being the city’s diary is visible at Wenger’s. “We get generations of families who have been coming to Wenger’s for decades, alongside young people discovering us for the first time. That is probably one of the most special things about Wenger’s. You can have someone come in and say, ‘My grandfather used to bring me here,’ and then, years later, they are bringing their own children!”
There is something deeply comforting about returning to a taste you have known all your life. But perhaps the more interesting question is not why we are nostalgic for Wenger’s. It is why we still need places like Wenger’s in a city that has never been particularly kind to its own past—Wenger’s is more than a bakery that has survived for a century. It is an accidental archive of Delhi.
Memories older than Instagram
Think about what a bakery can tell us about a city. It records what people celebrated, what they considered indulgent, what they bought for guests, what they carried home for their families. It reflects changing tastes without necessarily announcing those changes. The very idea of the modern bakery in Delhi has evolved dramatically, from the European-influenced confectionery traditions of the early 20th century to today’s sourdough loaves, laminated pastries, single-origin chocolate and elaborate entremets.
Today, Delhi has no shortage of places selling beautiful things in beautiful rooms. The language of baking has become more sophisticated, the techniques more global and the customer far more adventurous. Yet there is something that an Instagram-perfect croissant cannot quite replicate: the familiarity of a place that has been part of the city long enough to become woven into its personal histories. That, perhaps, is Wenger’s real currency.
Tandon feels that a big role is played by the consistency of the quality of what Wenger’s serves. “Trends will continue to change.
Consistency the key
Ingredients, techniques and presentation will evolve. But if you maintain the quality of what you make and give people a reason to trust you, you can continue to remain relevant through generations of change,” he added.
There is a temptation, whenever we speak of heritage food institutions, to freeze them in time. We turn them into monuments, surround them with sepia-toned memories and speak of them as though their greatest achievement is having resisted modernity. But a living food institution cannot survive by becoming a museum.
The challenge for Wenger’s, therefore, is not simply to preserve its past. It is to make that past meaningful to a new generation. Perhaps that is why its centenary is worth examining beyond the inevitable nostalgia. The real story is not that Wenger’s has survived 100 years. It is that Delhi has kept finding reasons to walk through its doors.