Bandra’s Gaijin and Fort’s The Dimsum Room are the newest addition to a wave of bars and cafes across India that are pairing food-and-beverage offerings with intimate vinyl listening experiences. Bandra’s Records.Coffee or Andheri’s tattoo studio and cafe Ink N Brew are more affordable and accessible. And in Delhi, there’s Genre and in Goa, Analogue as well as For The Record, which offer bespoke cocktails and global food offerings in a high-end audio space. But what unites this cross-country collective is a focus on vinyl records, and the idea that music is central to the experience rather than something playing in the background.
These listening spaces draw their inspiration—directly or indirectly—from Japan’s jazz kissa, which are small cafes and bars with high-end stereo systems where records were played in silence, beginning to end. The first jazz kissa emerged in the late 1920s, but they really found their groove in the 1950s as a way for people to listen to imported American jazz records that were too expensive to own individually, as one record could cost up to a week’s wages. Kissa culture peaked in the 1970s, with over 600 establishments across Japan, before falling out of fashion, but it never really went away. Now, it’s gone global, with kissa-inspired listening bars popping up all over the world in recent years.
“The thing that inspired me the most about Japanese vinyl bars is the obsession,” says Buland Shukla, an acoustical architect, jazz musician, and the proprietor of record and hi-fi sound equipment store Audiophile Goa. In 2020, he opened one of the first Indian listening bars, called For The Record, in Panjim, modelled on the Tokyo vinyl bars he had grown to love. “You have these small 20- to 30-seater bars run by guys who are totally obsessed with vinyl records, and that obsession manifests in the space.”
Like everything we do, India’s vinyl-focused spaces interpret the kissa concept differently, adapting the idea to local tastes and realities. None of them, for example, demand silence from the patrons when a record is playing. The music they play goes far beyond jazz, ranging from classic rock and psychedelia to soul, funk, and hip-hop. But many are a product of the same fanatical devotion to sound.
At TLR, Bhatt brought on Munro Acoustics to create a custom sound system inspired by Abbey Road Studios, and every aspect of the room’s design and materials has been chosen with acoustics in mind. Goa bars For The Record and Analogue also feature bespoke, hand-built sound systems, optimised for vinyl. That attention to sonic detail is rare in India, where even the most upmarket bars and clubs are often plagued by terrible acoustics and badly tuned PAs.
“A good listening room is a space where architecture meets acoustic science,” explains Nehal Shah, owner of online record store, India Record Co. “If the music is too loud, people will get annoyed and leave. And if it’s so soft that you can hear everyone talking, then that’s unpleasant too. But if you get it right, it enhances the whole experience.”
India’s vinyl-focused spaces interpret the kissa concept differently... None of them, for example, demand silence from the patrons when a record is playing. The music they play goes far beyond jazz, ranging from classic rock and psychedelia to soul, funk, and hip-hop.
The movement is small, but from the sound of it, acoustically minded venues are all that people want to talk about today. “A great vinyl bar is more than just gear,” adds Vansh Dang, who, along with Ketan SS Gohel, founded Analogue. “It’s the acoustics, the lighting, the way the space invites people to slow down and really listen. The music can’t just be background noise; it has to shape the mood, guide the room.”
There are plenty of reasons behind why people flock to these spaces—curiosity, the novelty factor, a sense of hipster cool. Discerning patrons are also increasingly on the lookout for more bespoke night-outs, something a little more relaxed and luxurious than vodka shots and ‘Naacho Naacho’ being blasted at ear-splitting volumes.
In such spaces, many regulars are vinyl enthusiasts, but there are also plenty who don’t own a single record themselves. They’re just fascinated by the ritual and intentionality of sitting and listening to a whole record rather than being subject to the algorithmic ADHD of a Spotify playlist. The sense of ceremony around playing a record pulls the music into the foreground. “There’s a craving for realness—in music, in culture, in nightlife,” says Dang. “Vinyl bars offer that. They’re a response to the speed of the digital world.”
You don’t absolutely need to spend a prince’s ransom on sound to create a perfect vinyl listening space, though. Take Record.Coffee, a cafe in Bandra that also features a collection of records curated by record store, The Revolver Club (TRC), alongside turntables on which to play the records. Here the focus is on making records accessible to as many people as possible. Like the Kala Ghoda Cafe Wine Bar, this cafe hosts regular album-listening sessions while also allowing people to bring and play their own records on the PA. “The idea was to build a location where people could experience vinyl and at the same time make it a third space,” says TRC founder Jude DeSouza, who’s in talks with several coffee shops around the country on ways to integrate vinyl into the experience they offer. “So, while the focus is on records, we also do a film club, and board games.”
Record stores such as India Record Co, TRC and Bengaluru’s newly-opened On The Jungle Floor also programme regular pop-ups and vinyl listening nights, spinning all-wax sets at bars, cafes, and private members’ clubs. These may not have the same hi-fidelity sonic experience as the more high-end listening bars, but they do the important work of initiating more and more people into the vinyl tribe. This is key, because the biggest challenge these spaces face—apart from the usual risks of running an F&B space—is that the vinyl resurgence is still in a pretty nascent stage in India. “It’s a long road, because I don’t think the audience is quite ready for it yet,” warns Shah. “You need to be patient, because it will take some time for awareness to build and for the market to really grow.”
