Candy & Green’s Shraddha Bhansali talks about Recreating A Healthier Version of Vegetarian Food.

“I always wanted to open a restaurant which supports this lifestyle that I lead.”

Founder and Owner of Candy & Green, Shraddha Bhansali talks about how her life is centered around vegetables and fruits and greens. As a vegetarian, her purpose has been to break the hard and fast image of vegetarianism and support a healthier version of it.

In the rooftop of her wholly vegetarian all day Dining Restaurant, Bar and Café, they cultivate vegetables.

“In our 750 square feet rooftop farm, we grow a lot of our own produce which we then use in our cooking.”

This produce, she describes, is rotated seasonally, and hence the menu of Candy & Green changes seasonally. The entire concept is to put the spotlight on vegetables authentic to India.

She talks about being a vegetarian all her life and says how as a child all the vegetarian places that they would dine out in, they were not fancy.

“When I was younger lot of the vegetarian restaurants I went to, they were not fancy.”

And most of the food that was identified as vegetarian food was cooked in unhealthy ways, with too much butter-cheese-and other saturated fats. She says that being a Gujarati, their home-cooked vegetarian food was unlike the foods served in restaurants. Hence, it failed to resonate with her. While she was studying hospitality in Boston, there was a huge surge of veganism. She talks about her own experience of eating at produce driven restaurants back there.

She talks about how India has one of the largest numbers of vegetarians and she was motivated to turn it around. Calling it a good time to venture, she came up with and opened a restaurant that supported clean eating and was meat-free. Soon she realized how she was not the only person who cared about this lifestyle, which explains its impact and the support.

“There’s a lot of people out there who do care about, despite whatever their dietary preferences are, they want to eat well.”

She explains how people do want to eat what’s good for their body and gut. A healthy lifestyle is hence preferred today. Talking about treating the body right, she says that being beautiful on the inside is just as important.

“What you put in your body, a lot of times shows up, in your skin, even temperament in general. Food is not only what feeds your body, but it can also be medicine.”

Hence she is a strong advocate of following a holistic diet.

“When I mean diet, I don’t mean all these fads or crash course diets, I’m talking about a balanced meal.”

It is very important to be sustainable and balanced when eating, and that’s the governing motivation of Candy and Green, says Shraddha.