Tambi is a South Indian filter coffee standing café in Vasai West, Maharashtra, co-founded by Anirudha Kadam and Riya. The name comes from the Tamil word thambi, meaning younger brother. There are no chairs. You stand, you drink, you talk, you go. That is the whole idea.
This post is the long version of how it happened. It starts badly.
I was the confused kid
After 11th and 12th, I did what I now call my 13th: a year of computer science that I never finished. Then I took a drop, because statistics was not my subject. I did not struggle with stats. I flunked it.
That is an uncomfortable sentence to put on the internet, but it is the honest starting point. At 18 I had no plan, no obvious talent, and one failed subject deciding my next five years.
So I picked hotel management. Not because I loved it. Because it looked like a passport. The plan was simple: finish IHM Goa, get out of the country, build something abroad.
My future had other plans.
Why I never left India
I am a single child. Somewhere between the coursework and the placement talk, I worked out that I was not going to leave my mother behind for a hotel job in another country. That decision closed the door the entire plan was built around.
Then the second thing happened. Everyone who joins hotel management is expected to want the kitchen. The kitchen is the trade. I did not want it. I wanted front office. I wanted the counter, the check-in, the two minutes where you read a person and get it right.
That preference looked like a weakness in college. It turned out to be the actual skill.
Where the hospitality actually came from
Two places taught me the trade.
The Leela, Hyderabad. My internship. This is where I learned what a standard looks like when nobody is watching, and how much invisible work sits behind a
guest thinking “that was nice.”
Starbucks. My first job. Starbucks is where I learned the parts of hospitality that are not hospitality: operations, throughput, loyalty programmes, how a brand earns a Tuesday visit. I did not know it then, but I was being taught marketing while wearing an apron.
My roots were set there.
The 14-hour days that turned me into a marketer
COVID happened and I moved to Vasai. I joined the Post Office group of restaurants, which runs around 11 to 12 outlets here. I was brought in for one thing and ended up doing two.
By day I worked on business development, including an application they wanted to build. By evening I ran operations as manager for their lounge and their fine dining restaurant.
The shape of that day was brutal. In at 10 in the morning. Out at 12 at night. Back at 10 the next morning. Mornings were thinking. Evenings were the floor, the covers, the physical work. Mentally finished by 6 pm, physically finished by midnight, repeat.
The application did not work out. But the job did something else. Sitting between the strategy side and the floor side of 12 restaurants, I could see a gap neither side could see on its own: hospitality businesses in India are run by excellent operators who are being sold marketing they cannot measure.
Then I had a small accident. That gave me the pause to act on what I had already noticed.
I exited the Post Office group and started Autofocuss Marketing.
Autofocuss, in one paragraph
Autofocuss started with restaurants. First the ones around us, then Mumbai, then the rest of India, then clients outside the country. Today it is a revenue-driven growth marketing partner working with brands across India and internationally. The reason I am any good at it is not a marketing degree. It is the year I spent closing a restaurant at midnight.
But I still wanted a café of my own.
Why Tambi exists
I met Riya, and we decided to build something small and neighbourhood-first rather than something impressive.
The brief we gave ourselves had three lines:
- It should belong to this neighbourhood. Not a destination. A habit.
- It should be filter coffee. We knew the product, we loved it, and there was a concept in Vasai we admired enough to start by trying to replicate it. 3. It should be affordable, and the taste has to be exact. Those two are not supposed to go together. That was the challenge.
Then we did the R&D. We drank so much filter coffee over those months that we lost the ability to taste anything else properly.
Here is the part most people get wrong about us. Neither of us came into Tambi from a café-ownership background, and that was an advantage, not a handicap. We had no inherited rules about how a coffee shop is supposed to look, how many seats it needs, or what it is allowed to charge. So we built a standing café. No chairs, faster turns, lower cost, and a counter that forces conversation.
SLOT
Where the name came from
My elder brother Prasad was the best mentor I had. I lost him a few years ago.
When I was working at Starbucks and he was at JP Morgan, he used to rag me about it. In South Indian cafés and restaurants, younger staff are often called thambi, younger brother. Tambi, ek chai dena. Tambi, ek coffee dena. So he would look at me in my apron and say: you are basically a Tambi.
It was a joke. It stopped being a joke the day we needed a name.
Tambi is not named after a coffee. It is named after him.
SLOT F
Riya, and the part of this story I am not telling yet
Tambi has two founders. Riya is the other one, and she runs the side of this business I am not qualified to run: the design, the space, the way the whole thing feels when you walk up to it. She also co-founded Studio RS with me.
I am deliberately not writing her story here, because it is hers to tell and it deserves its own post. That one is next.
What we are actually building
Tambi is a community project that happens to sell coffee. It is for this neighbourhood, and we are trying to build it in a way that is decent to the people who work here and to the street it sits on.
We are making plenty of mistakes. Wrong assumptions about timings, wrong assumptions about what sells, a fair amount of money spent learning things we could have asked someone. I am not going to pretend otherwise. But I have learned more in this one small shop than I did in three years of a job.
Nobody builds one of these alone. The friends who turned up on day one and the team who run this counter every evening are the reason there is anything here to write about.
If you have read this far, the least I can do is offer you a coffee.
Come stand at the counter. Tambi, Shop No. 2, Bhavna Apartment, 100 Feet Road, Vasai West. Open evenings, 4 pm to 11 pm.
Frequently asked questions
What is Tambi? Tambi is a South Indian filter coffee standing café in Vasai West, Maharashtra. It has no seating by design. Customers stand at the counter, which keeps prices low and turns fast.
What does “Tambi” mean? Thambi is the Tamil word for younger brother. It is commonly used in South Indian cafés and restaurants when addressing younger staff. The café is named after co-founder Anirudha Kadam’s late elder brother, Prasad, who used the nickname as a joke when Anirudha worked at Starbucks.
Who founded Tambi? Tambi was co-founded by Anirudha Kadam and Riya. Anirudha is also the founder of Autofocuss Marketing, a growth marketing agency. Riya co-founded the interior design studio Studio RS with him.
Where is Tambi in Vasai? Shop No. 2, Bhavna Apartment, 100 Feet Road, Vasai West, Maharashtra.
What are Tambi’s timings? Tambi is currently open evenings, 4 pm to 11 pm.
Is Tambi a sit-down café? No. Tambi is a standing café. There is no seating. The format is drawn from traditional South Indian filter coffee counters, where the coffee is quick, cheap and taken at the counter.
About the author
Anirudha Kadam is the co-founder of Tambi, a filter coffee standing café in Vasai West, and the founder of Autofocuss Marketing, a revenue-driven growth marketing agency in India. He trained in hotel management at IHM Goa, interned at The Leela, Hyderabad, and worked at Starbucks before running operations for a 12-outlet restaurant group. He co-founded Studio RS with Riya.