Manam Chocolate Karkhana

Chaitanya Muppala became India's first Level 3 Certified Chocolate Taster. He decided that Indian cacao was one of the world's great underappreciated ingredients, and rather than writing a strongly worded Instagram story about it, he built a fermentery – partnering with 150 farmers across 3,000 acres in West Godavari, before opening a 10,000 square foot chocolate destination in Banjara Hills. Some people really commit to their opinions.

The building announces itself with a facade that replicates Manam's chocolate tablet design, which means you enter the Karkhana by literally walking through a giant bar of chocolate. It sets the tone brilliantly. This is a place that takes craft extremely seriously, while foregoing the stiff upper lip of uber professionalism.

What’s happening inside Manam

Weathered steel meets 150-year-old repurposed wooden pillars, hand-chiselled terrazzo floors sit beneath concave terracotta roof tiles, and the air smells of warm cacao. Easy to say that you’ll know exactly how Willy Wonka felt in his chocolate factory. The building was once a heritage house, by the way.

The live chocolate-making floor is for roasting, winnowing, grinding, refining, conching, tempering and moulding: all happening in real time, and all things of beauty that you can witness.

From here, the chocolaterie produces bonbons coloured entirely by natural fruit extracts, truffles with ganache fillings in more flavours than you will be able to try in a single visit, and a tablet collection of 43 varieties spanning single-farm, single-origin India, creative fermentation and signature blend series.

The Creative Fermentation range – cacao fermented with Pedda Rasalu mango, Mango-ginger, or Chakkarakeli banana – is where things get thrilling, producing flavour profiles that taste like India in a way that no chocolate here has managed before.

Then there is the Chocolate Lab, where you make your own tablet from origin chocolates flowing on tap and take it home in personalized packaging. It is, in a word, delicious. Manam has won 17 awards at the Academy of Chocolate Awards UK and landed on TIME's list of the World's Greatest Places 2024. Who would have imagined that one day India would be represented by chocolate on the global map?

What to get at their café

The café at the back is the place to settle in as the afternoon turns up. Areca nut, coconut, banana, long pepper, and assorted flora from the West Godavari farms line the periphery, 150-year-old wooden pillars hold up the coffee station, and the Cold Drip Cacao Nitro, made by steeping coffee through single origin cacao, arrives with a buttery finish that stops conversation for a moment in the best possible way. Hot chocolates come from a dozen different origins, and the millet tacos and kheema bunny chow balance off that sugar high.