There are many ways to describe Bengaluru. You can call it the tech capital, garden city, or more recently, even a traffic maze. You’ve seen the city through screens, skylines, signboards but for artist Indu Antony, the city begins with a smell. “I kept trying to understand how we can experience a city through smells,” she says. “Bengaluru is an IT city; we look at it all the time. But how can we smell it?”
That thought became Vāsané (derived from the Kannada word for smell), her ongoing project that archives Bengaluru’s distinctive smells. There’s rain on red soil, jasmine at the Karaga festival, the buttery sweetness of a freshly baked Iyengar sponge cake cooling on a wire rack . It’s part art, part memory map, and part rebellion against the screen-glued, modern world.
So how a smell turn into a cocktail?
When Indu messaged Avinash Kapoli, partner and bartender at SOKA (recently ranked #28 in Asia’s 50 Best Bars 2025), on Instagram, it wasn’t exactly the kind of collaboration you expect to find in your DMs. “I thought Soka was doing some amazing cocktails and also very local in the way they were thinking about their cocktails. I just randomly messaged Avinash and said, “What do you think?” she explains. “He said, let’s have a meeting. And then we met, and I think it was a great sync.”
Avinash was intrigued. “Usually when we work on cocktails, you work on the aroma of the drink and you use an orange peel, maybe to give a bit of fragrance to the drink. But apart from that, it’s just garnishing,” he says. “But when Indu introduced me to Vāsané, I realised this was something I’d never seen before. Initially, I thought we should pair a drink with a smell but soon we realised we had to complement it instead.”
That shift from pairing to complementing changed everything. Instead of matching ingredients, the team began building experiences. The innovative bar experience combined perfumery, art, and mixology.
The collaboration unfolded like a sensory puzzle. Each cocktail would tell a story of Bengaluru, captured in a smell and reimagined as a drink. For the one inspired by Cubbon Park, Indu recreated the scent of freshly crushed grass the smell that lingers after you’ve sprawled on the lawn on a Sunday morning.
“When you go to Cubbon Park,” Avinash says, “there’s always someone selling cucumber with salt and chilli powder. So we thought, why not take that and turn it into a drink?” The result? A drink called ‘Strictly Couples’, a bright, crisp mix of cucumber, chilli, and Patrón Silver tequila, served with a scent capsule that releases the fragrance of Cubbon Park’s grass the moment you lift the glass.
Not everything worked the first time. When the team tried to translate the Iyengar bakery sponge cake smell into a drink, it was, in Avinash’s words, “very weird.” “Indu tried it and said, Avinash, this is not complementing the smell at all,” he says. “Then we thought when you eat the sponge cake, you usually have tea with it. So why not make a drink around that?”
That led to Chai & Sponge Cake, a gin-based cocktail with clarified masala chai and Lillet Rosé. A drink that tastes like a warm Bengaluru evening, comforting, aromatic, familiar. For Indu, the Iyengar cake is deeply personal. “It’s such a warm smell,” she says. “Just that scent brings a smile to your face. I think that’s what really touched me.”
If Cubbon Park and bakeries capture everyday nostalgia, the Karaga festival distils the soul of old Bengaluru. It’s a sensory overload with jasmine, camphor, sweat, and devotion.
“Karaga happens in the city centre,” Indu says. “The man who leads the festival runs through the streets at dawn. If you’re there at six o’clock, just the smell tells you he’s passing by.”
Distilling jasmine oil for that scent was a technical feat. “It’s a difficult flower to work with,” Indu admits but the cocktail that followed was divine in every sense. “When you go to a temple, you get teertha (tender coconut water, camphor, holy basi),” Avinash explains. “We took those ingredients and added rum to it. The drink is called Only God Can Judge Me.”
Other drinks in the lineup include Goose Sex Bomb, a Grey Goose-based homage to curd rice “We clarified the curd rice into a soda,” Avinash says, and Put One Dum, smoky and playful like a Bangalore night out.
Behind every experiment lies emotion. Indu started Vāsané during the pandemic, when her sister lost her sense of smell to COVID. “She couldn’t enjoy food anymore,” she recalls. “It made me realise how important smell is.”
She spent months walking through the city, documenting 137 smells before choosing 12 for the book and five for the collaboration. “We were talking to people, understanding their stories. Smell is abstract and fluid and you can’t capture it in one go,” she says. “It’s like memory. It slips and it blends.”
Avinash agrees. “It was nostalgic for me too,” he says. “As a kid, I’d pass by an Iyengar bakery after school and smell the sponge cake baking or go to Karaga with my parents. So it felt like we were bottling pieces of our own lives.”
Now in its second edition, the SOKA × Vāsané menu returns this November with five cocktails, five scents, and five memories of Bengaluru. Each one served under a cloche, waiting to be lifted and inhaled before that first sip.It’s part art, part science, and entirely about storytelling and a new language of nostalgia where smell and taste meet in perfect balance.
“Smell is an emotional archive,” says Indu. “Through this project, we wanted to capture the soul of Bengaluru. It’s a city that is constantly changing yet always familiar.” Avinash adds, “Bringing it back feels like reviving a piece of the city’s memory.”
