FAIRFIELD – Mira’s Café is a new restaurant in Fairfield that opened in the former Revelations Café on North Main Street.

The business is owned by Rahul and Pia Bharadwaj, who opened it in the summer of 2023. They did a soft opening on Aug. 5 where they invited their friends for a test-run to work out the kinks before opening to the general public on Aug. 9.

One of the promises the couple made to the community before they opened was to continue Revelations’ tradition of homemade pizzas, which they served on the first night. They knew customers were still missing Revelations, which closed that spring, and they wanted to make a good first impression.

“The amount of pressure we felt was immense, because Revelations was so loved by the town,” Pia said. “I was here on its last day, and people were crying with tears in their eyes.”

Mira’s Café serves a variety of dishes ranging from Indian to Italian, and it’s even starting to serve sushi on Sundays. The restaurant is open from 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and from 5-8 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday.

Thus far, the restaurant’s most popular dishes have been its dosas, crispy crepes made from scratch and with locally sourced ingredients that are organic whenever possible. Pia said someone from their restaurant goes to the Fairfield Farmers Market regularly to buy produce.

The restaurant’s menu is entirely vegan, which is important to the Bharadwaj family. Rahul had Type II diabetes for nine years, and had to take six pills per day. Pia got a book called “Reversing Diabetes in 21 Days” by Nandita Shah, and that changed both their lives.

Rahul assumed his condition was irreversible and that he’d have to live with it the rest of his life, but he noticed that switching to a vegan diet improved his health tremendously. Both Rahul and Pia reported being able to lose 40 pounds after making the changes recommended in the book.

“Something we want to share with this community is that healthy food can taste good,” Rahul said. “The perception that anything delicious needs to have meat, milk, butter or oils is wrong. You can eat very healthy foods and you don’t have to compromise on taste. You just have to explore.”

The restaurant’s name, Mira’s Café, does not refer to a person named Mira. It’s actually a combination of Pia’s childhood name, Mitu, and Rahul’s name, borrowing the first two letters in each to create M-I-R-A, or Mira.

Before moving to Fairfield, Rahul and Pia plus their two children were living in Louisville, Kentucky. They both had corporate jobs, and never worked in restaurants, though they always dreamed of opening one someday. They grew tired of the hustle and bustle of big city life, so they looked for a smaller community to raise their kids in, and that’s when they discovered Maharishi School in Fairfield.

While here visiting the school, they asked a realtor if they could see some commercial properties where they could open a restaurant. They met with the owner of Revelations, Betsy Howland, who was excited to meet the Bharadwaj family because she wanted the building to remain a restaurant.

“Rahul loves cooking. He has a skill for it, and he’s very talented,” Pia said. “I told him we could turn this into a business. Vegan markets are a $1 billion industry, and a growing industry.”

The idea of leaving Kentucky behind was not an easy decision for Rahul and Pia because they had just built a new house in 2020, but they couldn’t escape the calling they felt to move to Fairfield and open a restaurant.

“This was bigger than a new house,” Rahul said.