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If you come to Naad looking for a quick flat white and somewhere to answer emails, you will leave having accidentally attended a masterclass in Indian terroir, reconsidered your entire relationship with single-use packaging, and spent significantly longer than planned staring at a roasting machine.
Spread across 12,000 square feet overlooking Durgam Cheruvu in Jubilee Hills, Naad is the result of a collaboration between Marc Torm, a licensed Arabica and Robusta Q Grader with over three decades of experience (so, the kind of person who tastes a coffee and can tell you which side of the hill it came from) and hospitality entrepreneur Vikaas Passary, who has a track record of building fresh spaces to Hyderabad.
What to eat and drink
The food programme is at par with the coffee curation. Slow-fermented breads and small-batch bakes sit alongside a Build Your Own Breakfast menu. The drinks menu is still the most exciting part, though. Amongst the various techniques and infusions lies an Iced South Indian Filter coffee that knocks the whole program out of the park while Black Remedy is a slow-crafted cold brew, extracted drop by drop over 18 hours, drawing from the precision of Kyoto-style brewing, it unfolds with bright, naturally sweet notes.
More about the space and workshops
At the heart of the room is a live, open roastery where guests can watch green coffee become roasted coffee in real time, led by Tormo, whose sourcing is anchored in India's Western and Eastern Ghats ranging across Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Odisha and beyond, all farmed with biodiversity and long-term origin relationships as non-negotiables.
The retail model has been thought through from bean to packaging. Guests can smell and select beans before packing them into reusable tins, a pointed and practical rejection of the single-use café economy, so that you can walk out with your head held high. The Learning Centre runs workshops from beginner brewing through to advanced sensory science and post-harvest processing, structured, crucially, on the principle that coffee education should not be overwhelming. They’re worth signing up for.
Designed by Shankar Narayan Architects as a modern reimagining of the Indian Coffee House, the space itself is grounded in Tandur stone flooring laid in a broken pattern meant to evoke soil, with floor-to-ceiling glass facades that pull the expanse of Durgam Cheruvu visually into the room. Sculptural quarry-inspired outdoor seating references extraction and terroir. A mezzanine adds depth and intimacy simultaneously with a sound-proof reading room and classroom for those who want to sign up for their coffee-related courses. The Translate store, which has been driving the ikat movement in India for over 20 years, adds a chic vibe to the ground floor.
Naad's long-term ambition is to roast 1,000 tons of Indian specialty coffee over the next decade. Several cups in, I feel considerably confident about that.
Time Out tip: Sign up for one of the sensory workshops before you visit.