Courting food buffs

Kwality group's Dhruv Lamba hopes to piggyride the mall boom

In 1940, ice-creams proved to be the elusive big idea for the small-time Delhi restaurateur P.L. Lamba that laid the foundation for the Rs 60-crore foods business in the family.

During World War II, Lamba sold home-made ice-creams to the American GIs parked at modern-day Connaught Place. The enterprise was a hit.

Today, the Kwality group owns a chain of restaurants (including one in London), makes ice-cream for HLL and runs a flourishing catering business.

More than half a century later, it is time for another big idea by the third-generation restaurateur, Dhruv Lamba. At 23, he is all set to expand his family business to include a chain of food courts.

For starters, he has already set up a full-fledged food court at the DT Centre mall in Gurgaon. The food court serves trademark food from all the Kwality group owned restaurants under one roof. (The Kwality Group owns the bouquet of restaurants at the Asian Games Village in Delhi, Gaylords in Mumbai and London and the original Kwality restaurant in several cities.)

In fact, Lamba's food court experiment first started in a small way with the 3Cs multiplex complex in Delhi where he opened a Chopsticks Express counter.

The next destination for the food courts will be Mumbai and Goa. "We are looking at the suburbs in Mumbai and in Goa the food courts will come up at all the tourist places," claims Lamba.

Back in Delhi, Lamba has invested a whopping Rs 3.5 crore in the food court. But that is because the company has bought the property instead of renting it.

Considering that he is on a steep expansion curve, how does he hope to sustain such a business model? Explains Lamba: "We'll have only one or two such big places. At the rest of the malls we will have a counter from one of our three main restaurants brands, Chopsticks, Kwality and Breads & More".

Lamba plans around 10 such counters all over Delhi by the end of this year.

The young restaurateur is not fazed by competition either. He firmly believes that a lot of fine dining restaurants which have come up at the malls are not doing well.

"The kind of market we have here is different. The pricing has to be kept low for the casual customers who walk into the malls. No one can survive without that. Besides, quick service is what is needed," he says. On weekends, his food court gets nearly 1,000 footfalls, he claims.

Clearly, freshly returned from Switzerland where he pursued a degree in hotel management at Le Roche, Lamba junior is bursting with new ideas.

He feels that his food business can ride on the retail malls boom in the country. "We want to have a presence in each of them that opens up," he says.

That is not all. Lamba is also consolidating his one-and-half-year-old cafe brand, Bread & More. Having returned from Switzerland, Lamba precipitated his company's break from Hot Breads, a cafe-cum-bakery shop that the Kwality Group ran on a franchisee basis.

Lamba thought it best to "build a brand that would be ours." The first Bread & More outlet came up in Punjabi Bagh in Delhi.

Ever since, more outlets have come up in the city and the brand has gone to Mumbai and Goa as well. Bread & More's current turnover is nearly Rs 7 crore.