Meet the restaurateurs who are offering taste and innovation on a platter

A new entrepreneurial force is taking your dining-out decisions for you. Veer Arjun Singh meets some of the people driving it

Whether you gravitate towards your favourite bar for a cosy drink or pick a new gastropub in town to knock back a few, chances are you are being lured by the same set of people. They likely also own your favourite café and the new Asian bistro that you have been meaning to visit. They are feeding your Instagram and fuelling your greed. And they are doing all of this in fascinating ways.

First, they do their research. Delhiites, you eat out six times a month on average and prefer North Indian food. Mumbaikars have developed a taste for Italian (33 per cent) and Chinese (29 per cent) and dine out an average of 4.2 times a month. Bengalureans also like North Indian (27 per cent); and they spend the most on it: Rs 3,586 a month on average, followed by Mumbai’s Rs 2,890 and Delhi’s Rs 1,381. These findings are from the India Food Services Report released by the National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI) in June last year. The report also said the food services industry was a Rs 4,23,000-crore market in 2019, expected to grow to Rs 5,99,000 crore by 2022-23. But then, things changed.

India’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth estimated at 5 per cent by the National Statistical Office for FY19-20 is the lowest in 11 years. Retail Inflation at 7.35 per cent in December last year was the highest in five years. The economy is slowing and things are getting more expensive. And even as they expect that you might double down on your comfort food after a skipped appraisal at work — a hot chocolate at your favourite café followed by visits to your go-to bar — they know you might be forced to reconsider every purchase. 

“Apart from the slowing down of the economy, there’s the problem of oversupply. Just about anyone wants to open a restaurant,” says Chetan Rampal, partner at Olive Bar & Kitchen. A new restaurant is able to draw the attention of people for a while but customers tend to return to their comfort, he explains. “But the problem is that new restaurants just keep coming up.”

Massive Restaurants founder Zorawar Kalra

Fresh out of college with a diploma in management, Rampal joined the Olive Group in 2011 and soon proved to be an able deputy to A D Singh, the pioneering restaurateur who was instrumental in introducing India to casual dining in the early 2000s with his Olive brand of restaurants in Mumbai and Delhi. And with Manu Chandra, now among India’s most influential young chefs, also a partner, Rampal has given the group an enviable line-up of brands. Monkey Bar, a gastropub, was followed by The Fatty Bao, an Asian gastropub, and Toast & Tonic, a craft cocktail bar and restaurant that serves world cuisine. The Olive Group’s acclaimed Bombay Irani café and bar, SodaBottleOpenerWala, has spread to eight locations in six cities in five years. 

Their most recent offering is Cantan on Bengaluru’s plush Lavelle Road. Opened in May last year, the menu features regional Chinese dishes with an emphasis on street food from Sichuan and Guangzhou. Decades of experience and a few successful chains give this group the impetus to experiment with new cuisines and concepts.

Priyank Sukhija of First Fiddle has mostly been a one-man show. At 19 in 1997, the young man invested in a bowling alley that never took off. He managed to get some funds from his father for a restaurant in 1999 and opened Lazeez Affaire in Delhi’s Chanakyapuri. Twenty years on, it’s still the place where foreign tourists throng to taste “authentic North Indian” when their wallet doesn’t stretch to Bukhara (at the ITC Maurya hotel).

Sukhija has built something of an empire since. I met him last week over a sushi and a fig old-fashioned at Plum by Bent Chair in Delhi’s Aerocity, which opened in June 2018 and where everything you see is for sale. He was able to break even on his investments for Plum within a year. Two more Plums have come up since in Mumbai and Delhi. 

Cafe Delhi Heights co-founder Vikrant Batra

“Same store growth is slow in major cities, but Tier-2 markets are doing extremely well,” he says. Lord of the Drinks is his version of a go-to bar which has 13 outlets across Delhi-NCR, Pune and Mumbai and now Kanpur and Lucknow. Four more outlets are in the pipeline. “To go out and just celebrate nothing has become a part of our culture,” he says. He will soon come up with Diablo on the Mehrauli-Gurgaon road in Delhi. A Japanese restrobar, MisoSexy; another bar, Daddy; and a concept kept under wraps called Lies by Bent Chair are also in the works.

You might have strolled into Warehouse Cafe, Openhouse Cafe, Teddy Boy, Flying Saucer or Tamasha, his other bar lounges in Delhi. And with Plum and the beautifully designed, high-energy bar, Dragonfly Experience, in Aerocity, which he opened in partnership with pop singer-rapper, Badshah, last year, Sukhija now has a bar at every price point. First Fiddle closed at a revenue of Rs 235 crore in FY2018-19 and, despite a slowdown, is expected to clock Rs 265 crore this year.

Sukhija’s former partner, Akshay Anand, brought the international nightclub chain, Toy Room, to the Aloft Hotel in Delhi’s Aerocity last year after chasing the brand for 16 months in London. The club that opens only on Fridays and Saturdays is known for its pole dancers, expensive tables,  champagne-popping rituals and its hip-hop and R&B music. Located in a five-star hotel, it runs for 24 hours on the two nights and earns 95 per cent of its revenue from alcohol. 

Impresario CEO and MD Riyaaz Amlani at his office in Mumbai

This year, Anand signed a coveted 3,000 sq ft space in Aerocity’s JW Marriott to bring another A-lister brand to Delhi called Cozy Box, a pop-up restaurant running inside the Cannes Film Festival for the last 14 years by celebrity restaurateur, Jean-Bernard Fernandez-Versini. “It’s going to be one of the best designed places that Delhi has seen,” claims Anand.

And now meet the man who introduced many to sheeshah and encouraged you to laze around in cafés. Riyaaz Amlani’s Mocha revolutionised cafés. The first opened in Mumbai in 2001. “Mocha was a contemporarised take on the Turkish and Moroccan dawakhana,” says Amlani. A young shoe shop owner turned restaurateur at 19 could not have anticipated the demand it met with. Not that he had been to a dawakhana in Morocco or Turkey. “It was based on my research on the internet,” says the man who heads Impresario, one of India’s biggest hospitality companies, best known by gastronomes for its 10 outlets of gourmet bistro Smoke House Deli across Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi. The company has a total of 57 outlets across its brands.

Mocha has since shifted base to Tier-2 markets such as Lucknow and Ahmedabad. The high rentals in Mumbai did not justify the APG (average per customer) any more, he says. His café chain, Social, which becomes a co-working space in the day, bar by evening and a club after, has since taken over the major cities with its 26 outlets. Another brand from the company, antiSOCIAL, has outlets in Mumbai and Pune, and is known for its music gigs. 

Amlani has also become a sort of an authority on French-style food. After Slink & Bardot in Worli, the latest from Impresario is Soufflé S’il Vous Plait on South Mumbai’s Veer Nariman Road.

There’s another man who has been luring you, just not with many fancy names. While he refreshes his menu every few months, you probably go back for the same Juicy Lucy burger. Vikrant Batra has nailed consistency with Café Delhi Heights. From one outlet in DLF Cross Point Mall in Gurugram in 2001, it has grown to 24 outlets across Delhi, Mumbai, Pune and Bengaluru. 

Batra inherited a catering business from his parents where he spent hours in the kitchen with halwais and learned to refresh an Indian food menu that would serve gatherings of thousands. “When I opened my first restaurant, it bled for 18 months,” says Batra. Today, people only visit an unpopular Delhi mall for the “original” Delhi Heights. The latest on its menu is a page each for vegan and superfoods. “I run a place where three generations can come eat and drink what they like,” says Batra. 

Akshay Anand

I met him at his new place,  Dhansoo Café in Delhi, which has borrowed the ground floor from the Peruvian fine-dining restaurant, Nueva, that he opened with cricketer Virat Kohli in 2017 to mixed reviews. It has a niche clientele and will continue to run, Batra says. The chic new restaurant features a largely Indian menu and their Aslam Chicken approximates its place of origin near Jama Masjid in Delhi well, just more accessibly and hygienically. “It’s not about opening new brands, just doing something new,” he says. His is a family-owned business in the true sense where his brother manages the finances and mother perfects the menu across its outlets.

The Kalras are yet another family known for its North Indian food pedigree. Jiggs Kalra was among the most respected restaurateurs in the country. His son, Zorawar, heads Massive Restaurants, which runs Masala Library by Jiggs Kalra, a brand that has won numerous awards and has a restaurant each in Delhi and Mumbai. The only other outlet is at the J W Marriott Marquis Dubai. “It’s a premium fine-dining restaurant and I am not keen on opening too many of them and diluting my father’s brand,” says Kalra. 

Kalra manages to build loyalties while satisfying his patrons’ need for novelty. He runs a successful chain of Made in Punjab restaurants. And his Farzi Café, which takes a modernistic approach to North Indian cuisine, is the one creating a larger footprint around the country with five outlets and more in the pipeline. “Farzi is a modern restaurant and has grown really fast, but a Made in Punjab will always have that special place in the heart of its original customers,” says Kalra. He is still bringing world cuisine to India with brands like Pa Pa Ya, TYGR, Bo-Tai, Younion and the recently opened Hotel ShangHigh. But Kalra is committed to taking Indian food to the global palate. His company has 18 outlets in total and is present in seven countries.

While restaurateurs are dealing with a slowing economy, multiple licensing issues, a rollback of input tax credit under new GST norms and businesses canabalising each other, they seem most worried about finding loyal patronage in a new generation. Like Kalra says: “The cream will rise to the top and that’s the nature of the business.” We will simply have more and better to choose from.