Marketing new cuisine

You've been there, done that. All the specialty cuisine restaurants "" Thai, Italian, Lebanese and Mediterranean "" in the city have been tried.

But "market cuisine"? QBA (pronounced Cuba), a new 14,000 sq ft resto-bar in the heart of Delhi's Connaught Place hopes that there will be takers for this new, imported culinary theory.

"It's all about freshness and pricing it right. While other restaurants attempt to serve authentic cuisine with genuine spices, we adapt the cuisine according to the year's season, change the menu every week and use produce and ingredients from the local market to keep the prices low," says Felix Turianskyj, the chef from Montreal who's been flown in to experiment with the idea in Delhi.

The restaurant, promoted by Delhi-based WG Hospitality, is expected to be launched later this month. And if one can call it a trend of sorts hitting the Delhi restaurateurs, this will be another food project where friends have turned co-promoters (The other Friends & Co project is Fforum).

At WG, the promoters are Narender Singh, franchisee for Lee Cooper India, carpet manufacturer Shammi Oberoi, garment exporters Har Pratap Singh and Manjot Rana and Atul Kapoor, who runs T-shirt studios.

Surprisingly, some of them have bit into the food business before. N Singh runs Chinese restaurant Lotus Pond in south Delhi. Atul Kapoor runs the Kathi joints in the city. "We believe that Connaught Place is a big catchment area as many offices are located here," says Har Pratap Singh.

With three lakh people trooping into CP everyday, the 180-seater restaurant hopes it will attract enough clients. Flaunting it as the biggest stand-alone restaurant in the city, the promoters say it will be affordable at Rs 500 per meal for a couple.

Meanwhile, Turianskyj says applying the concept of market cuisine in India is tough. He's visiting the local farms and getting used to the subzi and fish markets. "You can always import lobsters from Canada and charge five times over but that's not the idea," he says.