Chennai’s Sortd Cafe offers cold brews, chilli chicken and work pods

Envisioned as a community space, Sortd, Chennai’s newest cafe brings together functional work pods and an eclectic menu featuring cold brews, avocado dosas, berry salads and lamb poppers

The tables at Sortd have rounded edges to comfortably rest your elbows. The lights on the ceiling in the work pods there can be dimmed or made brighter, depending on the meeting in progress, the weather in Chennai, or the mood. The walls can be written on, and the shelves are stacked with Rubix cubes and spinners; for anyone who has the urge to click a pen or fidget through a meeting. I am handed a fidget spinner when I sit down to chat with the team behind this space.

If you have ever side-eyed someone in a cafe taking a loud phone call or earnestly chatting away on a Zoom meeting amidst all the coffee and chaos, what Sortd has to offer might seem most timely, and a rather interesting experiment for the city. 

Satha Annamalai and Kalpana Rao, the founders say they got chatting a couple of years ago about the idea for a space like this. “As someone who runs an IT services company, I realised that people were becoming less enthused about coming into the office. We instead wanted to meet occasionally, in a place where we could be productive, and have good food,” he says. Kalpana says she also began to wonder about why people head to a cafe to work in the first place, when there is no privacy or quiet. “Sortd has been conceived as a space not just to come in and work, but for those who enjoy being a part of a community. You can wear your earphones here and type away seated in a work pod, all while the cafe’s regulars walk in and out for coffee and food,” she says.  

While Chennai’s ever-burgeoning cafe scene seems to now have it all, with pretty spaces, Instagrammable drinks and desserts, Sortd comes with work pods to work out of, small, aesthetically designed meeting rooms that can seat up to 10, a larger room on the terrace that can hold at least 40 people and of course, very Instagrammable art, and a glass house extension which houses a dining space overlooking their kitchen. 

Japtej Ahluwalia, partner at Sortd, and co-founder of BORN (Beyond Ordinary Restaurants and Nosh) points out that the work spaces are not relegated to a single floor and are instead, spread across both floors, alongside tables for the regular visitors. The work pods and meeting rooms can be reserved on an hourly basis through an online system which will become functional shortly.  

“We do not want to be branded a ‘work cafe’,” says Manoj Padmanabhan, partner Sortd and Japtej’s co-founder at BORN. “This is a unique place, and the food and experience has been thought through, you can be productive here or use the space for entertainment. We are not a work cafe,” he reiterates.

The menu is more than indicative of how serious the team at Sortd is about making their food experience shine. Aiming to break away from the usual sandwich-pasta-pizza-coffee menus, the cafe has an extensive, eclectic menu, where one can find everything from salads with pomegranate molasses to tamarind rice with kola urundais and a deconstructed Madurai vada curry. Chef Gopalsamy Mani declares grandly that he was keen on working on a menu that is not the usual for Chennai, elevating the regular cafe food experience.