BY SHIKHA DAS SHANKAR*
Your ping-ponging attention can be blamed on the barrage of digital chimes, or the crawling traffic that tested every ounce of your patience. But step into the 645 sq ft cafe on Howell Mill Road, Atlanta, and your attention cannot be anywhere but there. The smell of cardamom instantly lifts your mood. The mural to the left catches your eye. But what’s hard to miss is Monica Sunny’s smile as she talks with her youngest guests, three siblings—an infant and two toddlers—explaining to them which part of India tea comes from.
You have just walked into The Chai Box Cafe, and there is no second-guessing that you are part of something warm and welcoming.
Brewing Strong
Atlanta has never been short on chai. The city and its suburbs are lined with Indian and Pakistani restaurants and grocery stores that serve chai, mostly ordered after a meal to mark satiety or give you company while you shop. But the Chai Box Cafe is the first place dedicated just to chai. Monica is clear about what she wants people to experience, and how the perfect cup gets served to her guests. The chai being served is not dripping in a steady stream from a coffee machine. And it’s not her popular chai concentrate, the one that found its way into Costcos across the country and to Oprah’s Favorite Things list.
“We knew we wanted to open a local chai place, a chai place that serves the chai we grew up drinking,” she says. “Our place is small, but that’s how chai places used to be in India. Chai stalls everywhere, and chai always being made, pot after pot. Just like that, we make our chai in a patila (a wide-bottomed pot). We aerate it, add freshly ground spices, just like the way it’s done in India. The focus is on being authentic.”
Not Slowing Down
The Chai Box Cafe officially opened on June 14, after around a year of planning and execution. Still in the soft opening phase, the line of idling customers waiting to get in stretches past the cafe on weekends, even before the doors open.
What has caught Monica off guard isn’t the interest. It’s the distance people are willing to travel for a cup of it. “Customers have driven in from Duluth and Sugarloaf, from Alpharetta, from Tennessee, two and a half hours away. From Birmingham. From Florida. Some are bringing parents. Some are bringing grandparents,” Monica says. “I’m just so grateful for the community and how people are, you know, wanting to go to a chai place.”
Monica is no stranger to the chai business, and she isn’t new to having a following, either. Before the café came to life, she’d built a loyal customer base through her chai concentrate, and others who found her during the pandemic, tuning in to what became known as her “chai meditations,” or live sessions of her brewing chai online. Now, many of them are showing up in person, eager to see the physical space, and her, for themselves.
On the busiest weekends, when the line stretches past the tiny cafe, some customers don’t wait for a table. They carry their chai and pastries out to the parking lot and sit on the open trunks of their cars, enjoying their freshly brewed chai to the fullest.
And the customers aren’t who you’d expect, or rather, they’re not only who you’d expect. There are South Asian families bringing grandparents in to relive a memory. There are people who say they’ve never had real chai before, only lattes from chain coffee shops. There’s a woman who walked in simply because the sign said chai. Monica said the lady would not have bothered had it been an other café serving the usual espressos and lattes.
The Malai Everyone’s Talking About
Apart from the freshly brewed chai, filter coffee, and fusion pastries, it’s Monica’s signature malai drawing the real demand. The cardamom-infused whipped topping is her take on the thick layer of malai that forms on top after milk is boiled and left to cool down in India. She takes cream, whips it up, and folds in freshly ground cardamom sourced from small businesses in Kerala. It was originally made to top just one of their cold drinks on the menu. But, as Monica says, due to popularity, “Now it’s going on nearly everything, hot chai, iced chai, even coffee, and customers are asking to buy containers of it to take home.”
The cloudy, cardamom-laced goodness certainly has a fan base of its own.
It isn’t only the malai, either. The delicately blended teas, the curated pastries, and even the condensed milk used to make the kaapi (filter coffee), are all made in-house too at their Marietta facility.
A Family Affair
The Chai Box Cafe carries her family’s fingerprints everywhere you look. The cafe’s design came from a sketch her youngest son drew years ago, framed and hanging on the café wall now. Monica points to it proudly, noting the finished space turned out almost exactly as he’d imagined it. Her husband, an engineer, worked behind the scenes to make sure the cafe met every criterion and deadline. The Danish on the counter carries her mother’s saag paneer recipe. A framed picture of her journey across India with her boys adorns one wall. It’s this love of her culture and heritage that she brings to her guests.
It’s Monica herself at the heart of the Chai Box brand and the café’s daily operations. She clocks in at 5:30 every morning and stays the full day on weekends, managing bottling at the Marietta workshop and making sure every cup brewed at the cafe meets her standard. She smiles at every guest, runs food to the tables, gives her young visitors warm hugs, and explains to first-timers why chai-making is a daily ritual in millions of homes around the world. Ask what she’s running one and she smiles big before saying, “I feel like when you’re doing something that you love and it’s been your dream, I don’t even think of it as work. I love waking up at four in the morning. I love meeting people, customers that have been having our chai for years, friends that are coming to support, neighbors. We’re making new friends.”
Guests love to watch her pour from large tea kettles, hot chai arcing from a height straight into the cup below. For now, that cup is paper. After the official opening, it’ll be a clay cup, sourced from Kerala, in a design she and her youngest son worked out together. Her two older sons, working in different parts of the country, have promised they’ll be there for the official ribbon-cutting with the mayor on August 7. Monica shares, with excitement, that she already has new drinks and treats in the pipeline that will get added to the menu after the inauguration. Atlanta is feeling the excitement too, and clearly, can’t wait for more.
*Shikha Das Shankar is a feature writer for NRI Pulse.
