It’s 1:00 p.m. on a weekday, though you wouldn’t know it looking at the storefront of Magnolia Bakery’s first outlet in Delhi NCR.

A Mercedes, a Porsche, a Volvo pull up, one after another, all adding bodies to the already 20-person queue outside the store on Golf Course Road in Gurugram. Kids in school uniforms press their faces up against the glass, marvelling at the “purple cakes” making their way to the icing station. Aunties in heels and sunglasses chatter about how their New York trips would be incomplete without a visit to this iconic NYC bakery. 

A majority of the crowd, though, is made up of 20- and 30-somethings, who are simply responding to what’s become an Instagram rallying cry.

Everyone wants a bite, Collage: Neha Mehrotra

View in Browser

“This place is all over my reels. So obviously I had to come make my own reel,” said one 21-year-old. Another 28-year-old informs her friends that this was Alia Bhatt’s favourite bakery. “She loves the tres leches here,” she said. Others are even more obvious about their priorities. They pull up, see the line, and settle for taking pictures against the storefront, before beating a hasty retreat.

None of this is all that surprising. 

The bakery, which first opened its doors in New York’s West Village in 1996, has found its way into pop culture time and again. From Carrie Bradshow biting into a pink vanilla buttercream cupcake on the iconic show Sex and the City—that triggered the early-2000s cupcake craze—to the creation of the ‘pink puddin’ for the recent Warner Bros film Birds of Prey, Magnolia is a master of hype.

Apart from the 12 company-owned outlets across the US, the company has expanded into seven other countries through franchises, including Turkey, the UAE, Philippines, and India, where operator Spago Foods—run by husband and wife Nischay Jayshankar and Zonu Reddy—has opened 11 outlets since 2019. Magnolia did have a franchise outlet in Japan too, but it’s reportedly shut down. 

In 2021, the venture-capital firm RSE Ventures—with investments in chef David Chang’s Momofuku brand and dessert chain Milk Bar—bought Magnolia from then-owner Steve Abrams at an undisclosed price. Mostly because Abrams didn’t have the capital required for expansion.