Lots on their plate

You may not know Manu and Sonia Mohindra, but almost every other restaurant that opens these days has their imprint, finds Anoothi Vishal.

This is the first time I am lunching in a restaurant that is yet to open. Amigo, a Mexican restaurant that promises to serve the cuisines of the Mayans and the Incas (instead of the Tex-Mex most of us know), is a venture by the Singhanias — ostensibly, the first in a line of fine-dines. It will open later this year when the “season” for all fine things truly kicks in, but is already in its “pre-op” stage, which means that both the kitchen and the service are up and running, and the interiors are mostly done — baring a couple of pictures to fill up the blank walls and, of course, a liquor licence.

 

As I enter, I spot a carton containing a flat screen TV lying around — and in the middle of all this Sonia and Manu Mohindra, the only restaurant consultants of their kind in the country, nay, in all of Asia; the couple you are most likely to call on if you want to open a restaurant anywhere in the country. From beaten metal spoons on the tables to the interiors, menu and the staff, the Mohindras offer “complete restaurant solutions”.

This particular lunch is somewhat of a family affair. The Mohindras, who work only five days a week (and plan to make that four-and-half soon), have not only got their five-year-old son along but also their respective mothers. “Do you get your family to give feedback each time you launch something new?” I ask as I am helped into a Rs 6,000-Andy Thornton chair. Sonia laughs. The family, it transpires, is quite sick of visiting their “sites”— there’re so many of them. Besides, “there are times when even I don’t visit till the very end. We have a very competent team and they actually get upset if I do decide to check out something,” she tells me.

Ten years ago, of course, this wasn’t the case. The Mohindras then were your average hospitality industry couple, working long hours in the ITC group’s project development division. Both had army backgrounds, had moved hotel chains and were fairly bored when they decided to turn entrepreneurs. “We knew that if we couldn’t make it with both our skills, we wouldn’t anyhow,” Manu says.

They started off with a restaurant and a catering business that was meant to be “our bread and butter”, and also took up small restaurant projects at a time when consultants were unheard of. “I think our biggest challenge was making people understand what we were doing. What they would say was ‘menu bana do’,” says Sonia. To their surprise, they found that people ready to spend lakhs on a restaurant were reluctant to put an exhaust fan in the kitchen. “We’ll put up a big (ceiling) fan,” they’d say, Sonia remembers. Luckily, times have changed — and how.

The Mohindras refuse to make any suggestions when it comes to ordering. “You can at least tell us what is not working,” Manu says. So I decide to err on the side of adventurousness and ask for a beetroot juice mocktail. Agh! I am prepared to hate it — and tell our consultants as much. Surprisingly, I don’t. The nachos presented alongside the appropriate salsa are crisper than, say, the TGIF version. “We import the flour,” Manu says and then, moving on asks, “Tell me, as a diner, would it matter to you what I put on the walls?”

There are some metal masks on the wall facing me and Manu points to these: “My idea was to import these from Mexico at $1,000 a piece and Mr Singhania said, of course, we must get the best, but Sonia shot it down saying, ‘Are you mad?’” In the end, the lady in charge got her team to download pictures of similar masks from the Internet and asked a local craftsman to make them for a fraction of the sum.

As we dig into the main course, Manu wisecracks: “We were at Pusa (college) together. I ragged her (Sonia) since she was my junior then.” We all laugh. But it is clearly Sonia who has a head for business. “I tell clients that we will have the full business plan ready first. It is easy to sell them some creative spiel but that just means a waste of money,” she points out. The full plan means right down to the colour of paint on the walls. “Some people say, we’ll decide on the site. But what will you do, stop work and say, oh no, I don’t like that shade, and waste money on staff salaries and rentals?” she asks.

The Mohindras have clearly defined their budgets and to illustrate their point, do a comparison of Ai, the new AD Singh restaurant (for part of which they were roped in), and Tabula Rasa, another smart restaurant in the category that they did earlier. The areas for both are roughly similar, but Tabula Rasa was set up for Rs 2.2 crore and, last year, earned Rs 13.5 crore while Ai, still new, cost Rs 6-7 crore. “Whatever it makes, when it comes to valuation, obviously Tabula will do better,” say the Mohindras as an example of why trained professionals in the biz make it more viable, though, of course, AD’s philosophy is totally different.

Dessert is a superb tequila-flavoured chocolate mousse but since we are not on to sweet nothings, I ask the Mohindras about allegations that they reject projects that are not big enough. They are candid and tell me that now they only take up work that interests them. “If someone comes saying that they’d like another Olive or another Bukhara, that doesn’t interest us,” Sonia says, and as to “big enough” projects, she says the budget must be “realistic”. Even then, the Mohindras do about nine restaurants a month, roughly 10 per cent of what opens every month in the country.

And what else do they do in their spare time? “You mean besides food?” they shoot back. Their own projects apart, there’s checking out competition (“we go to all restaurants”), revisiting all the old-faves (their son loves RED, the fine-dine at Radisson, Noida, because the chef there has got all the five-year-old’s preferences down pat) and ordering kebabs and biryani from Nizamuddin that the entire office loves. That’s quite a lot of food for a living.