Riding the storm: Meet Riyaaz Amlani, CEO, Impresario Handmade Restaurants

A voice of the restaurant industry, Amlani tells Pavan Lall that while the pandemic has been hard, it has also helped separate the wheat from the chaff

Riyaaz Amlani looks straight ahead at me as he walks into his restaurant, the Salt Water Café in Bandra, Mumbai, oblivious to the flurry of attention from managers, waitstaff and curious guests. (We are meeting weeks before the disruption caused by the third Covid wave.) The music is loud on the first floor, so we proceed to grab a table on the quieter upper section.

Impresario Handmade Restaurants, the firm he founded in 2001 with Mocha — Coffees & Conversations, today has a network of 60-odd restaurants across 16 cities and brands such as Social, antiSOCIAL, Smoke House Deli, Goodness to Go, Salt Water Café, FLEA Bazaar Café, Ishaara, Slink & Bardot, Soufflé S'il Vous Plaît, Prithvi Café and Mocha.

In the unlisted space, Amlani is by revenue the largest single player in the restaurant business. While he is now former president of the National Restaurant Association of India (which has just petitioned the Prime Minister, calling for a relook at the stringent restrictions on the sector), he remains a spokesperson of sorts for the industry, once famously remarking that it was easier to get an ordnance factory’s weapons up and running than a restaurant. More so in the Covid-battered period. Permissions-wise, “now you need only 24 licences versus 30-plus, so it has come down a little bit,” he says. “We still spend half our time interacting with authorities and it still takes ardently long to get our licences and approvals upfront. Laws are different from municipality to municipality. So it is still a challenge.”

Everyone knows how hard the pandemic hit the food business. But it has also helped separate the wheat from the chaff, he says. “It is disguised unemployment when there are 15 people but only five are doing real work, right?” says the 47-year-old. “So I think what Covid has really done is ejected the specialists. Earlier, it was like one will only make drinks but not bus tables or help reserve tables or crunch cash. Now everybody does everything.”

He, too, has rationalised operations. For instance, given the pandemic uncertainty, he decided against renewing the lease of Smoke House Deli in Khan Market, and the popular Delhi outlet has shut down after nine years.

There are areas where he has stepped up to help. During the lockdown, as Mumbai’s famous dabbawalas struggled to survive, Amlani, who was pushing for delivery routes, tied up with over a dozen of them to deliver food from his restaurants. It was a win-win for both.

Amlani today owns a little under 20 per cent of the company, down from 40 per cent earlier. Noting my expression, he says, “We had no choice. We were being pushed along in that direction. But, yes, we are good.” He says the company is averaging an internal run rate of about Rs 40 crore per month, or revenue of around Rs 500 crore a year.

It’s no accident that we are meeting at Amlani’s eatery at his request. This will mean I’m also contributing to his revenue. He grins and says that was the whole point.

A heavy-set man with short, dark hair and the face and gait of a toughened streetfighter who has seen his fair share of ups and downs, Amlani was born to a Parsi mother and a Shia Muslim father in Mumbai. He was about 12 when the family moved to Byculla, then not the toniest part of town. “The childhood years were squarely middle-class.” he says. His father was in the chemicals business and would supply tallow to cosmetics firms. He passed away due to Covid a year ago.

Amlani went to St Mary’s School, and was entrepreneurial from the word go. “I was keen on making my own money. When I was 13, I started working as a shoe salesman (at Metro Shoes in the evenings after school),” he recalls.

The adage, “you can judge a man by his shoes”, he says is fairly accurate. At 15, with a loan from his grandmother, he opened his own shoe store, Shoe Wagon, in a 100 sq ft space. Its tagline: “The shoes that take you places”. He ran it through college and a little after, doing everything — from managing sales to slipping shoes onto customers’ feet.

Then, ambitious and savvy, he bought a “Dooker”, the dome-shaped Premier Fiat with an Italian engine, for Rs 10,000. After driving it for five years, he sold it for Rs 15,000 — perhaps the only such profitable car deal, he chuckles.

His learnings from those years: don’t over-engineer a product, don’t intimidate customers with a store and don’t cater to only one customer because India is made of several layers of markets. With that, we order lunch.

It’s a chicken burger and orange juice for me and a spicy chicken sambal wrap and a tuna dip with vegetable chips for Amlani. (His father also ran a one-location restaurant called Beri’s.)

“Have you had a long night?” I ask him. “Me?” says Amlani, “Yes, we had a series of long nights because we just launched our Malad store.”

Our main course is here.  I take charge of my chicken sandwich, which is a handful. Amlani, having the advantage of experience and ownership, tackles his wraps with ease. “I am a non-fussy eater,” he says. “I enjoy engineering spaces. That’s my thing.”

It was the 1990s when he started working for Pritish Nandy, who was running his listed entertainment firm at the time. He eventually launched Mocha, a chain of coffee franchises, and then a series of restaurants before going big on Social, a chain of casual eateries. “Social has become a real obsession. I’m trying to kind of envisage what social spaces of tomorrow will look like.”

And is there an IPO in sight? At some point yes, he says.

It’s time to pay the cheque, and an entertaining face-off ensues. The staff refuses my credit card, seeing I’m seated at their boss’s table. “It’s okay, really, it’s on Business Standard,” he tells them. They’re unmoved. He glowers at them and repeats that it's okay to give me the bill. Still no reaction. This time a steely glint accompanies the instruction. The staff leaves. The cheque finally arrives, but with a discount. Amlani shrugs and looks resigned. On our way out, I notice the entrepreneur’s shoes: white leather and canvas designer sneakers, the kind that befit a man who’s comfortable being on the move.