Cooking up a storm abroad

Vikrant Chougule, CEO of the Indage Group, is busy taking the Rs 500-crore company's popular Athena lounge bar places. After setting up two outlets in Mumbai, the hip hangout is opening at Delhi's Park Royale hotel too.

By January, Athena will have hit Hyderabad and Bangalore as well. But for Chougule, there are no full stops. "Next, we plan to take Athena to London, Singapore and Dubai," he says.

Surprisingly, Athena is not the only homegrown Indian brand that is looking at the overseas market. Barista Coffee International has already started business in Dubai and Sri Lanka.

Another quick-service restaurant, Pizza Corner, is also moving into Beijing and Sri Lanka in the next three months. Sagar Ratna, the south Indian food joint, which opened a food court in Dubai this June, is launching a full-fledged restaurant in Sharjah's Lulu Centre city mall next month.

Jairam Banan, the chairman-cum-managing director of Sagar Ratna Hotels says that the company has received inquiries from Singapore, the UK and the US but it is yet to finalise its plans. Clearly, the list of bars and restaurants eager to spread their wings outside India is endless. Nirula's Corner House Ltd plans to hit the West Asia market by 2007. "We will look at options such as technology transfer, staff training and setting up Nirula outlets in places like Dubai and Qatar," says Vikas Attri, the company's technical advisor.

It is no surprise why the food and bar joints are eyeing the West Asia market. Besides tourist traffic, there is a huge Indian community in some of these markets.

In Singapore, says the Singapore embassy in India website, there are 217,000 Indians, of which 70 per cent are of Tamil origin. Dubai apparently is home to some 70,000 Indians. The entire West Asia is reported to have a population of 1.3 million NRIs and PIOs.

Small wonder then that even the Pune-based Monsoon Agro Bio Ltd, promoted by farmer-entrepreneur Rahul Mhaske, is planning to take Corn Club, a corn-based speciality joint to Dubai.

The company currently runs 25 Corn Club outlets in India and is looking at exporting corn kernal and frozen food products like corn tikka and cutlets in a big way.

West Asia also makes sense to most promoters as it offers good returns and the labour cost is on par with India's. Says Banan: "Profits are almost 200 per cent more and people there are willing to work longer hours."

But Dubai may not be a cake walk as it is already teeming with at least 35 other Indian restaurants. Competition could come from Indian immigrants-run restaurant chains like Tulsi and Little India, as well as Mumbai-based Vittal Kamath's pao bhaji chain.

But not everyone is making a beeline for Dubai. In February next year, Om Son's Ltd, which opened the Days of the Raj restaurant in Delhi recently, is going to New Zealand to set up food joints in Auckland and Christchurch.

"Both the cities are in South Island and attract tourists and business travellers," says Om Son's Manish Choudhury. Mumbai-based Chinese Hotels & Cuisine Pvt Ltd, meanwhile, is checking out Washington for its Nanking and Imperial Garden restaurant brands.

Even Moti Mahal is close to signing an MoU with an NRI businessman for a restaurant in Cincinnati (US), says its owner Monish Gujral. Shalom too has offers to open its restaurants in Barcelona and London. But its owner Dhiraj Arora says that they want to consolidate the Shalom chain in India first.

Needless to say, the food chain promoters sniffing profits abroad could only mean good news for the Indian community that craves for comfort food from homeland.