Letting us in on it?

RESTAURANTS: Sudha Kukreja has a magic formula for restaurant success that everyone wants to swipe.

We have the worst cooks at home," jokes Sudha Kukreja, arguably Delhi's most successful restaurateur. "Every one we train joins one of the restaurants," she complains.

Given the rate at which Kukreja is opening restaurants, it is no surprise that the turnover of cooks in her own home is so high. Apart from the fabulously value-for-money Chilli Sseason that serves some of the best Thai food in town, the Red Hot Cafe in Gurgaon, and Ploof, the restaurant that got Delhiites drooling over seafood, Kukreja has recently launched Ssutra, an essentially Oriental cuisine restaurant in Naraina, West Delhi, a zone with unexplored potential "" though Kukreja just shrugs and says, "In that market, you still need to have Indian cuisine to be viable, so even at Ssutra, we have Oriental but also Indian".

But that's another story. For now, Ssutra apart, Kukreja is ready with two other projects: one, that will serve "gourmet food in a coffee shop" type of format, to open in a couple of weeks, and another, a "Chilli Sseason type", to open in a couple of months.

Given how fickle the F&B market is, you could be excused for seeing such "chain" ambitions with scepticism. But Kukreja seems to have a genuine touch for success.

It has been quite an eventful decade for her; beginning as a hobby cook dispensing neighbourhood cooking lessons in Delhi, she started a small catering business before hitting big time as a celebrity restaurateur.

Today, Ambrosia, Kukreja's family-controlled company, has perfected an ostensibly set formula for success.

"Obviously, you need good food," she says, "but also good PR and good selling. This is one business where you need to look after both production and marketing."

The formula, by the way, sounds rather uncomplicated. To succeed, you must rent property (as opposed to buying it "" and not always in prime locales), and set up a venture for no more than Rs 30-40 lakh.

The restaurant should become self-sustaining in three months, a sign that it has clicked, and should start paying you back in two years.

But restaurants is not the only thing that Kukreja has taken up. In the last two years, she has taken up consultancy projects for restaurants, hotels, and food companies based both in India and overseas.

Current projects include two hotels in Chennai, one in Coimbatore, an Indian restaurant in Bali, and one in Bangkok, apart from another restaurant in Singapore that is keen to do "Indian-Chinese", believe it or not, with Kukreja as the advisor.

What's more, Kukreja advises international food marketers keen on India, which often stretches her expertise to markets you might think of as unrelated. DuPont, for example, roped her in for a soya project, and she has even done a cookbook with the company.

The consultancy arm of the business alone gets in Rs 1 crore in annual turnover, 30 per cent of the entire company's, "but we hope to take it to 50 per cent". Restaurants, after all, are about maximising revenue off a designated formula. In contrast, "here, you are always thinking..." Indeed.