The Pastry Case at Swadesi Is Doing Something Nobody Else in Chicago Is Doing
Chef Sujan Sarkar's modern Indian café in the West Loop brings the pedigree of Indienne and Nadu to a malai croissant and a jaggery chocolate chip cookie that deserve their own conversation.
The name means "from one's own country" in Hindi, which is a precise description of what chef Sujan Sarkar is doing here. Sarkar runs Indienne, one of Chicago's few Michelin-starred Indian restaurants, and Nadu, an affordable tasting menu that is already on the Heavy Hitters list. Swadesi is their casual concept, opened in March 2024 in the West Loop, and the brief is specific: bring contemporary Indian café culture to Chicago rather than reproduce a traditional Indian sweet shop or a full-service restaurant. The result is something the city did not have before and now very much needs.
The space earns its atmosphere before you order anything. Indian fabric wallpaper that makes the interior immediately distinct, enough seating that the crowd never feels crammed, and a energy that on a good day is loud and electric in the way that a genuinely popular neighborhood spot gets loud. People sharing pastries, trying each other's chai, laughing. Not crammed. Just alive.
The front is the pastry case, which is large and takes up most of the entry. It should. The pastries are the reason to come first and the reason to bring people with you so you can order more of them. The malai croissant is the place to start. It's malai custard on flaky laminated pastry, sweet without tipping over, the kind of thing that makes you understand immediately why this place has the pedigree it has.
The jaggery chocolate chip cookie is getting added to the chocolate chip cookie guide and it earns the spot. Jaggery is an unrefined sugar common across South and Southeast Asian cooking — the Thai equivalent is palm sugar, which tells you something about how far this ingredient travels. At Swadesi it brings a smoky, molasses-forward depth to the chocolate chip cookie that makes it genuinely distinct from every other version on the list. The flour blend adds whole wheat and semolina, which gives the cookie a thicker, denser, chewier texture that sets it apart structurally as much as in flavor. It is big and it is very good.
The savory breakfast items are worth exploring, particularly if you are rolling in with a group. The breakfast sandwich with custardy egg, potato tikki, American cheese, and garlic mayo is the kind of thing that makes the Indian-meets-Western format feel completely natural rather than conceptual. The samosa chaat croissant and butter chicken croissant are both worth trying. The suggestion for a first visit is to come with people so you can move across the case rather than committing to one or two things.
The coffee is Metric, which is standard at this tier of Chicago café. The execution here is fine without being exceptional. That is beside the point. The house-made masala chai is the thing to order — specific, well-made, and the clearest signal of what makes Swadesi different from a café that just happens to serve Indian-inspired pastries. The chai is not inspired by anything. It is the real thing.
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