Milana Ram immigrated to the United States from southern India in 2008. She spent the next two decades worrying about the future of her family’s coffee farm in Chikmagalur, whose history dates back to the 1920s. In 2023, when Ram’s parents started thinking about selling the property, which has been in the family for five generations, Ram and her husband, Himanshu Bhaisare, decided to save it by starting a coffee company.
They launched Le Mil’s first as an online shop and popup at the Newark Farmers Market. On Aug. 15, Ram and Bhaisare are opening Le Mil’s at 1330 Polk St., where it will apparently be San Francisco’s only brick-and-mortar café dedicated to Indian specialty coffee. Ram and Bhaisare hope to educate Bay Area customers about the flavor profiles of Indian coffee.
India is the world’s seventh-largest coffee producer but its coffee is largely underrepresented in the industry. The country mainly produces robusta, Ram said, a coffee species that is generally written off as lower in quality than arabica, which comprises most of the coffee consumed in America and virtually all specialty coffee. While there have been several Indian coffee popups in the Bay Area, Le Mil’s is just one of two Indian specialty coffee roasters in the region, alongside Kaveri Coffee. “I realized that there’s a serious lack of representation of Indian coffee,” Ram said. “I just didn’t see myself going back to India taking care of the farm, so I did the next best thing.”
Le Mil’s arrives following a yearslong boom in the Bay Area’s Indian population, which has profoundly impacted the region’s food scene. From 2010 to 2024, Indians were the region’s fastest-growing major ethnic group; they now account for a larger share of the population in the Bay Area than in any other major metropolitan area in the country. Owing to significant employment in the tech industry, they are also the region’s highest-earning ethnic group, with a median household making around $300,000 a year. “One of the reasons we are going from solely online and farmers markets to getting our brick-and-mortar is because of our Indian community,” Ram said. “Without their support, I would just be any other roaster.”…