Ludus: bit of a club, bit of a cafe

We walk into Cafe Ludus at the Metropolitan Mall in Saket, and a sprawling space with a multiple personality opens up before us. We’re looking around to choose from the mix — the club-like corner with a DJ console and loud music, the vibrant wood-rise that’s very vintage with its bookshelves

We walk into Cafe Ludus at the Metropolitan Mall in Saket, and a sprawling space with a multiple personality opens up before us.

We’re looking around to choose from the mix — the club-like corner with a DJ console and loud music, the vibrant wood-rise that’s very vintage with its bookshelves and retro collectibles, the tavern-style stool-bar, prim centre lounge and an outside with a very fine-diner feel. It’s between the books that we take seat, before taking a walk to check out the Audrey Hepburn and motorcycle books and old international magazines.

Not interested? There’s a vintage radio and crayon-melt craft for eye-pleasers, if not the FTV on screen. Perhaps many tastes, many ways is the way they chose to go and we do score them on that, but we’d suggest turning down the volume a bit because it could, at times, interfere with a good ol’ cafe chat. Even if a ‘sports cafe’ is more what they presumably meant to be, taking from their name that’s Roman for ‘game’. Their chef, very passionate, makes up for it though — his fresh, hot servings of spinach crunchies and assorted snacks bring us back to conversation, before a relaxed risotto, aptly creamy, leaves us with no more room for desert. Fair game.

Meal for two: Rs 1,500.