Social with a distance: Restaurants try new ideas to attract customers

Leaner teams, smaller menus and fewer tables — a forced grounding of six months has stripped the restaurant business of its flamboyance. Still in the thick of the pandemic, new investments are simply quixotic and casual human contact is a luxury we can ill afford.

But Riyaaz Amlani, the founder of Impresario Handmade Restaurants, is planning to open two new outlets of Social — a brand of café-bars that personifies the idea of casual mingling. The irony is impeccable.

According to the Indian Food Service Report 2019, the industry was pegged at Rs 4.23 trillion in 2018-2019. “About Rs 2 trillion has