A whiff of Tuscany in Kolkata

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Nivedita Agarwal

This pretty 25-year-old combines a love for food with the entrepreneurial streak to create a unique lifestyle experience out of it. As the joint owner of a swanky gourmet café in the city of joy, restaurateur Nivedita Agarwal has fed many a hungry mouth with her delicious Italian fare. From managing finances to designing aesthetics, this businesswoman wears all her multi-tasking hats with a ravishing smile!

The Italian grub hub:
Four years ago, the eatery scene was very different, if not bleak, in Kolkata, says Nivedita. There was no proper standalone Italian joint to speak of, which is when she thought, why not come up with one that would dole out authentic food at a reasonable cost? In partnership with her husband, and after four months of intense planning and preparation, Kolkata’s very own quaint Italian cafe - housed in a plush 6,200 sq. ft. bungalow on Sarat Chatterjee Avenue — came alive in 2008.
Casa Toscana means a Tuscan home — the idea was to germinate an idyllic food court with the same warm feel one gets at a countryside Tuscan restaurant.

Bon Appetito:
One just needs to sample the mouth-watering twice-baked cheese souffle, the Proscuito, the sumptuous Pere-e-Grissini and of course, the classic Tiramisu, to see that Casa Toscana takes a huge amount of care with its food preparation.
The café hopes to provide a complete experience under one roof. An adjacent bakery coffee shop called Casa Paneterria retails a variety of oils, jams, pasta and other Italian foods, and serves as a place where thinking minds could engage in an animated chit-chat over a piping-hot cuppa and crunchy snacks.
A lounge next door is a perfect place to unwind to some peppy music. A cheese room sells all dairy products across the counter.
And besides providing plenty of avenues to indulge in gastronomical delights, a considerable amount of space at the cafe has been marked out for art retail.

A one-stop destination:
This is a modern-day concept to converge everything diverse under a single canopy.
Here, the thinking minds engage in an animated chit-chat over a piping-hot cuppa and crunchy-munchy snacks.
An attached lounge is a perfect plea for the flocking visitors with a pair of happy-feet to hop into and let their hair down to some peppy music. And yes, besides all of this, we do have a venue, well, not exactly in the capacity of a gallery, but a considerable amount of space to retail art.

Bonding commerce with creativity:
I am a professionally trained designer and since my hubby has always been in the F&B sector, it kind of pushed me to further apply my soft skills into designing his properties. I look into the marketing side of the enterprise to strike a fine balance between the two supportive poles of an enterprise.