Over the past few years, dessert lovers have seen it all—crookies, rasgulla tiramisus, pistachio tres leches, Dubai-chocolate-everything. Last week, a croissant-like, glossy-top, golden-brown horn with a glitter of salt took over social media, especially across the US. The ‘salt bread’, or shio pan, first made its appearance in Japanese bakeries around 2014 and soon became a viral sensation in Korean cafes.
Though the buttery, flaky pastry cannot be classified as a dessert in the traditional sense, if a salted, savoury-leaning pastry can dominate dessert feeds, it’s a sign: salt is coming for your baked goodies and desserts—in the most adventurous ways. Yes, you heard it right.
While social media was obsessing over shio pan, in Mumbai pastry chef Pooja Dhingra was reworking the role of salt in her own way.
The first page of Pooja Dhingra’s newly opened Pardon Our French, on a quiet leafy lane in Mumbai’s Ballard Estate, is titled Parlez Vous Pastry. It features nine desserts, eight of which contain salt. The only one that doesn’t is a seasonal strawberries-and-cream dish served with honey toast. The finishing touch? A healthy drizzle of basil oil, which adds exactly the kind of savoury finish this not-too-sweet treat needs.
Salt also features in five caffeinated beverages on POF’s three-page drinks menu, laden with a variety of coffees and teas, from solid classics to creative spins like a cold brew with rosemary and salted honey. Yes, salt in coffee or tea sounds strange, but these drinks don’t taste strange at all. Instead, they’re astonishingly tasty.
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Corn tres leches
The POF chocolate cake is served with sea salt flakes
Banoffee French toast
POF's lemon cake
In a country (and city) where desserts taste like they’re half sugar by weight, refreshingly, at POF, sugar seems to play the role that salt does in everyday savoury meals—it’s there, you can definitely taste it, but what it really does is prop up other flavours, making everything taste better instead of showboating.
I get my usual iced matcha, when Dhingra calls for a salted Earl Grey matcha latte for herself, and a brown butter cappuccino to share, and I keep sneaking sips from both. “But that’s just me; I love salt in everything,” she says with a grin. “It’s grownup Pooj! When I made the Le15 menu, I was 22-23 years old. My tastebuds were very different.”
Here’s the thing with POF: If a 23-year-old Pooja Dhingra gave us Le15 Patisserie and India’s first perfect macarons; and a 30-year-old Dhingra gave us Le15 Cafe in Colaba with a menu of savoury waffles, heaving salads, sandwiches (like a croissant crammed with avocados, ham, eggs, cheese and mayo), and deli counter full of sugared morsels; then the nearly-40-year-old chef has brought to 2026’s Mumbai a menu that meets how both millennials and Gen Z café habitués like to eat today. A little anytime goodie, something fun and delicious yet uncomplicated and satisfying—not a cavity speedrun that makes the algo throw a soleus push-up at you.
Among the most grownup-tasting items on the menu is something called Chikoo & Hazelnut. It has chikoo cream and hazelnut butter swirled with chikoo caramel and topped with fresh chikoo and malt crumbs. It’s chikoo as we have never had it before in dessert: rich, mellow, malty, buttery, lightly sweet with a touch of salt. Another is the POF Chocolate Cake, dense, dark, and delicious, topped with a billow of dark chocolate mousse, slicked with olive oil, and stippled with salt.
As with Le15, Paris is still the frame of reference for Pardon Our French, but this time it’s more about Dhingra’s long-standing relationship with the city. “Paris stays the same, but the girl who went there many years ago is completely different,” she says. So, it’s cheekier, more playful, more self-assured. In this room, designed by Shweta Kaushik of SKID, there are moody framed prints, vintage mirrors and candy-striped drapes painted on the walls, bentwood chairs, and large windows streaming in gorgeous sunlight. A sign high on the wall above the coffee machine reads ‘Oui To Everything’.
Designed by Shweta Kaushik of SKID, POF's moodboard is dominated by pastel hues, candy-striped drapes and flowers in to-go cups
For those who hopped onto the 2016 throwback trend, it will be fun to know that POF opened for guests exactly 10 years to the day after Le15 Cafe opened in Colaba. (It shut six years ago, during the Covid-19 pandemic.) “The thing I missed the most was this…” says Dhingra, sitting back down after chatting with another guest. “This interaction with people and having a space where people can come and interact with the brand. I thought it would really make me happy to move my central kitchen to a space that can also be a storefront, where people can come into the kitchen.”
And I do go into the kitchen, watching cooks smoothly and quietly glide around, squeezing basil oil onto strawberries and cream or stirring bowls with creamy goodies. The savoury kitchen alongside the main kitchen is tiny but sends out hearty, comforting plates, like masala French toast: a cheese sandwich made with pillowy bread dunked in egg custard, then wrapped in a thin masala omelette. It comes with a hot and sweet salsa on the side. Dhingra has brought in chef Anandita Kamani to consult on non-sweet dishes, and as of 10 days ago, her menu has kicked in. There is a dish of eggs and soldiers—an onsen-soft egg in an egg cup, with khari sticks, crackers, and slim slices of cut toast to dip into it, and cheese sauce and chilli flakes to drizzle over. French fries come podi-dusted or blanketed with chillies and cheese. New menu items will be revealed “week on week, month on month”, Dhingra adds.
In the last 10 years, cafes have burgeoned in Mumbai, as has coffee. And the city has changed: its southern end is becoming exciting again, thanks to the coastal road, and lots more places are opening in the neighbourhood. “Ten years ago, coffee machines were far cheaper,” says Dhingra. “The machines that used to be the best of the best back then are right now considered mediocre. Also, 10 years ago, I wouldn’t even have thought of anyone from Bombay going anywhere or standing in a line [for a specific kind of food]. People stand in lines now, which is great. Location is not as important today as it was then. Now with social media, people really travel to try a place out.”
We can see people walking into this lane (which until now was best known for Cafe Universal) to get a slab or two of passionfruit cheesecake with white chocolate and the pleasant crunch of the fruit’s seeds. Or even Dhingra’s latest mashup of salted vanilla soft serve with shards of croissant and salted caramel sauce, to be had alongside a banana bread latte, or a yuzu pulp cold brew with tonic and a white truffle spritz.
POF also has a wall of blooms, like a floral vertical garden, its flowers in to-go cups, their stems going in where the straw does, feeding on water instead of coffee. “The thought was… why should I wait for somebody else to get flowers for me?” says Dhingra. “It’s a really cute thing to do for yourself, to buy yourself coffee and flowers. So, [POF’s tagline] is ‘coffee, bakes, and blooms’. This then becomes a ritual you do for yourself. That’s it.” Tucked among their leaves are mini scrolls of fortunes written by Dhingra. Now that is sweet.
