The chain czars

profiles some of the country's leading fine dining restaurateurs who are all set to expand their areas of operation.

There are many restaurateurs who will tell you how it is impossible really to set up a fine-dining chain; fast food is fine. And indeed many a talented ones "" think chef-owners like Rahul Akerkar in Mumbai, Ritu Dalmia in Delhi "" haven't managed to go beyond their single showpieces.

But if building a restaurant is sometimes high art, it is certainly high commerce too. And if the industry is booming, individual restaurateurs too are growing, setting their sights higher and expanding their areas of operations to not just more metros, cities and towns in the subcontinent but to Europe, North America and South-east Asia.

It is this ambition that will define how India, Indians and Indophiles eat out in the coming few years. Let the kitchen kings take a bow. 
 

FOODIES IN FIGURES
	Prakash  Nichani	Anjan  Chatterjee	A D  Singh	Dheeraj  Arora	Riyaaz  Amlani
Number of restaurant outlets	17.00	29.00	3	9#	42
Number of brands	11.00	4.00	1	4	6
Number of fine-dining brands	6.00	3.00	1	2	1
Turnover (Rs cr)	80-90*	75**	20	12##	30
Present in	Bangalore,  Hyderabad,  Mumbai	All metros and cities like Pune, Chandigarh  and Guwahati	Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore	Delhi, Goa	Mumbai,  Delhi
Going to	All over A and B  category cities  in India	Ludhiana,  Jullandar, Manhattan, and London^	Two new  brands in Delhi  this year, one new  one in  Bangalore, and spaces  in Singapore and Dubai  by 2008	Mumbai,  Bangalore, Dubai, Malaysia plus two more  brands in Delhi next year. One hotel in Goa	Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad
*Annualised;  **Doubling turnover to Rs 150 crore next year; # (6 in Delhi, 3 in Goa); ##per annum (in Delhi);  ^where O Calcutta will make its debut in the next few months

Anjan Chatterjee
What kind of a restaurant advertises itself on TV? Obviously, a moneyed one.

But if you raised an eyebrow when you saw the primetime campaign for Mainland China, the first Indian restaurant chain to have a full-fledged commercial, here's why you shouldn't have been so surprised: the ad showcases Anjan Chatterjee's twin skills "" as a restaurateur and as an adman.

Advertising continues to be a career for the man behind India's largest restaurant chain as he mentions brand names like "Everest Masala", "Ujala" and "Emami Fair and Handsome" with as much pride as Mainland China, O' Calcutta and Sigri.

Speciality Restaurants started in the early nineties, when Chatterjee decided to set up something that gave good food but not at five-star prices. "Those were the days when snow peas and broccoli were unknown outside the five-stars," he remembers.

The first Mainland was a small set up on a shoe-string budget (Rs 50,000) run by Chatterjee and his wife who both cooked and served personally. Trained hotel hands were hired as the business grew.

Today the restaurants "" last I asked him for the figure "" do 24 lakh covers a year and he hires staff from a catering college that he himself owns. There are no short-cuts for a man who says his job is like a "doctor's... playing with people's lives".

A D Singh
No one needs to introduce A D Singh "" even to people who have never been to one of his beautiful restaurants.

He is Indian restaurateuring's most public face, present a lot of mornings on Page Three. So what lurks behind the glamour? A creative man, sure, his career after all has thrived on the events he dreamt up "" from jazz evenings and Med ones to the first boat parties for Mumbai's elite.

But this is also an incredibly enterprising mind. "I could always bring together many things "" money, people, resources", points out Singh.

When 28-year-old Aditya returned from America in 1988 with a degree in electric engineering, he found himself a job at an NGO. But money was not forthcoming and all he aspired to was a business that would earn him Rs 4,000 a month.

The boat parties began and slowly metamorphosed into more of event management when the urge to eat expensive but divine desserts made by Mumbai's Parsi ladies led to Singh opening Just Desserts. The parlour ran as an evenings-only set-up, in a day-time store.

Today, as Singh talks about launching at least three new brands (besides Olive), all in the luxury segment, with many crores in investment, he can look back on the long journey it has been. Then again, he may never look back.

Riyaaz Amlani
As we make our way to the Smoke House Grill in GK II, Delhi, newly-opened, cousin of the pretty Salt Water Grill in Mumbai, the parking attendant points out the entrance: "Jahan woh motor cycle hai."

When I mention this to Riyaaz Amlani, owner, he visibly perks up "" as only an avid biker can. "So has it become a landmark, the bike?" he asks. You guessed right, it's his. But Amlani is passionate about many other things too. There are films, there is music, there are even kiddies (his biological clock is ticking away, he says), then there is coffee "" it's not for nothing that he came up with Mocha, "coffee with conversation", outlets after a stint as coffee taster-and-buyer in the US "" but more than that there's a passion for "juxtaposing" disparate flavours that marks both him and his restaurants.

At Mocha, there is good ol' Maggi served up with the likes of Arrabiata sauce; recipes from Amlani's "bachelor days" (while studying entertainment management in the US) and both Salt Water and Smoke House Grill have probably benefitted from his experiments as well; the menu is certainly unusual enough even though stuff like biryani with chocolate didn't find its way here. Thank god. Amlani insists he can cook "enough to kill people" but when he talks about food it is more like an owner-chef than just someone wanting to make a lot of money.

Prakash Nichani
His family was in the construction business but throughout his childhood Nichani was more interested in the kitchen. His grandmother had a huge repertoire of Frontier recipes and the family, "into networking", as he says candidly, would entertain bigwigs, often resulting in grand dinners.

"I used to get the danda, everyone would ask whether I wanted to be a cook," he remembers. Those were the days before hoteliering became a legit profession.

Nevertheless, he trained in food production (all his menus get personal attention even today), only to find himself taking up the family business when his father died young. However, he did take a plunge into restaurateuring. Chanking Chinese"" not the most imaginative of names "" was set up on a show-string budget of Rs 2 lakh-plus in the late eighties.

The turning point came almost a decade later when Nichani opened a three-star hotel in Bangalore with three F&B outlets.

"The restaurants did better business than the hotel," and Nichani decided to focus on the segment. Today, with 11 brands across India"" including the popular Aromas of China and the incredible Sahib Sindh Sultan where Raj cuisine is served in refurbished, genuine railway carriages "" Nichani need not look to construction for his bread, butter and jam.

Dheeraj Arora
In 1994-95, Bangalore had all the pubs, Delhi had nothing "" outside the five-stars.

As a young businessman spending a lot of time in Bangalore "" "I had to work just for a couple of hours in the day and took to spending the evenings pub-hopping" "" Dheeraj Arora was constantly reminded of this. He knew here was a huge opportunity but could do nothing as property in the capital was not forthcoming sans "unreasonable demands..." Things took a backseat for a while till Arora garnered resources (and a friendlier landlord) and opened No Escape, a pub-nightclub, in Connaught Place.

As far as evening entertainment went, this was not classy (it did have the crowds though) and Arora soon realised that he needed to shift to a posher address with a posher product. That was Shalom, now three. It ushered in a whole new trend of (all-white) lounge-bars and clients like Rahul Gandhi.

For Arora, it seems to have become a lucky charm. All his subsequent brands have a "by Shalom" tag and Arora has even branded merchandise as such. Other brands include Laidbackwaters and Line of No Control, and these are supposed to travel far and wide, though the biggest challenge comes from finding the right employees to gel with the "Shalom philosophy""" customers first.

HONOURABLE MENTION

No mention of India's top restaurateurs can be complete without Old World Hospitality's Rohit Khattar, whose success in a notoriously fickle business is enviable.

From Chor Bizarre to Oriental Octopus and restaurants at the India Habitat Centre in Delhi, all of his restaurants have succeeded. And while the man himself is notoriously media-shy, his new ventures in London, Tamarai, which recently won a food Oscar for the best wine list, and Sitaaray, with a Bollywood-style ambience, are doing much of the talking.