Supersized restaurants are the buzz: Anoothi Vishal gets a taste of their business.
Even if you don’t dig pizzas as a rule, it may be easy to get addicted to the onion and parma ham super-thin-crust one at ItALIA, a new stand-alone at DLF Place, luxury mall Emporio’s sibling in Delhi. They don’t load it with mozzarella and tomatoes here; effectively debunking Americanised notions. And the crust is so thin that you’d be hard put to find a comparision even in the street cafes of Italy — take it from me, I tried.
At Rs 575 plus, it is pizza for a pretty price — but not the most expensive item on the menu. The chefs (Bangalore-based Mandaar Sukhantar, who trained with celebrity chef Antonio Carluccio, and Delhi’s Bakshish Dean, who runs the restaurant) take care to woo you with other goodies too: Dainty frito misto of seafood with horseradish sauce, pan-seared scampi, even the complimentary bread with locally-sourced pumpkin dip (that you’d never imagined as an ingredient for Italian cooking), and gorgeous lamb shanks with saffron risotto (a whopping Rs 895). The question, you may ask, is will anyone bite, given the slowdown?
The last doesn’t seems to be bothering India’s top restaurateurs that much as we see a slew of big ticket openings in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and even in Chennai (an all-veg diner serving Jain world cuisine) and Kolkata (Souk opens at the Taj Bengal) often dismissed as F&B laggards.
Here’s a list: Apart from ItALIA, The Park’s new venture brought in from Bangalore where it has been a brand within the hotel, there is fashion designer Rohit Bal’s Cibo, an Italian restaurant that seeks to transport you to Europe both with its food and design (Romanesque statues, cobbled flooring, cascading water on customised marble blocks...), a Korean restaurant with three karoke rooms (Kumgang Gonie at The Ashok) and a trendy pan-Asian one from Mayfair (Taman Gang at DLF Place), known for its Hollywood premiere parties...
Then, there are the likes of Caperberry, a contemporary European diner in Bangalore, opened by a former Taj chef who wants to rival the Orient Express and build in elements of Ferran Adria’s molecular gastronomy into it! There is Shiro, a new luxury offering in Bangalore (sister outlets in Mumbai and Goa), and Rakabdar, an ambitious Indian diner in the heart of the central business district in Bangalore, with food by ITC master chef Imtiaz Quereshi’s sons Ashfaque and Irfan, who borrow from their 200-year-old legacy — with a twist.
In Mumbai, apart from Hitler’s Cross (not on this list) that’s garnering international headlines for its ill-advised name and places like Oba Lounge in Colaba, by Raja Dhody, the big news, of course, is that Indigo’s Rahul Akerkar is set to open up his next soon. But Akerkar is hardly alone. Counterpart AD Singh of Olive and Ai is set to launch his third brand in August-September in Delhi — to be called Lap (Lounge and Play) — with film star Arjun Rampal, who has “deep roots in Delhi” and “has wanted to open a place like this for ages”, as Singh puts it.
But why open in the midst of a slowdown? Singh is candid when he points out that the space has been in the planning for two years and therefore had to open. This is true for many other restaurants too; all ambitious projects that were planned when the going was good. But having said that, restaurateurs like Singh argue that while people may have scaled down “from high end wines to medium prices, imported to local, brunches to lunches”, and that therefore the breakeven period may be longer for these large offerings, restaurants in India are not so badly off, after all. “Our industry has more resilience and hence we suffer less than the West,” adds Singh.
Indeed, these exploding numbers look ridiculous when compared with what is happening elsewhere. In London, for instance, as Gordon Ramsay battles his bank and Antony Worrall Thompson, another celebrity chef, closes four restaurants (the bank refused to give him more credit), slashed, £20-tasting menus are the new reality. Within India too, retail, as we all know, is hardly cheering. A recent KPMG survey only highlights this perception: According to it, 70 per cent of retailers in the country say that the slowdown has adversely affected footfalls. The report states that it expects a shift away from lifestyle goods; however, it also mentions that “food retailing” is largely insulated.
But “food retailing” is hardly a single segment. Within the restaurant industry, while sales have gone up in the QSR segment, the top end has suffered — including restaurants within hotels — because of both the terror attacks and the downturn, and particularly in markets such as Bangalore that depended on expat customers. Behind the smokescreen, most restaurateurs admit that sales have gone down by about 20-30 per cent and that lunches and weekdays are worrying. Surprisingly, restaurants have been less forthcoming that in the West with slashed prices and are retaining margins (the convention has been to multiply food costs by three to arrive at the selling price).
And when you do ask someone about the impact of the slowdown, the likely answer you’ll get is, “...but do you honestly think that people (the kind who supposedly go to high-end restaurants) watch prices when they eat?” They may just if they are ordering a portion of exclusive Waghu beef (that we are not even supposed to acknowledge because of import restrictions) or Iberico ham (costs ¤1,500 for just one leg). But before we unravel any more business plans, here’s a look at the restaurant to open this season:
Catalonia, as I am told, when I enter The Lodhi at the Aman New Delhi past a fleet of restored Ambassador cars, is a land with glorious cuisine and culture, distinctive from the rest of Spain, insulated more through the vagaries of history than geography. It is also the birthplace of modern Spanish cuisine.
But don’t go looking for molecular gastronomy at The Lodhi, the Catalonian restaurant spread over two levels, with a buzzing tapas bar below and a huge wine cellar. The cuisine is a modern tailoring of flavours expected to go down well with Indians and the emphasis is on “good taste” rather than on a wow, visual experience. If you are in an informal mood, head to the friendly tapas bar where I am persuaded to a small sherry sampling with some excellent tapas, including shrimps in lemon butter sauce, salty anchovies, Galician style octopus and so forth. The portions (at lunch) are enough for two but the surprise is that the restaurant is not as expensive (Rs 3,500 for two; Rs 500 per dish for the tapas) and formidable as you perhaps expected given the hotel’s phenomenal room rates.
The Aman, of course, also had been in the planning for a while and its “big” restaurants showcasing the resort’s ethos of luxury (to include the notion of space too) would necessarily have needed to open up in just that format regardless of the economy. But GM Antony Treston also points to the way in which large spaces have been broken up to incorporate different elements “so that you don’t have the feeling of sitting in a large, empty restaurant”.
That’s what other big restaurants have done too. At ItALIA, there are three separate areas designed to make the restaurant look less spread out than it actually is — a formal one, a café-type seating and a lovely, al fresco terrace with a view of the Delhi Ridge. Rakabdar in Bangalore, spread over four-and-half floors (11,000 sq ft), devotes two floors to its formal dining space, the rest to Ayra, a lounge bar. The owners —first-time restaurateurs —admit to having paid a premium for the location opposite the Forum Mall (Rs 5 crore project cost approximately) because, “We wanted to start out with a bang, to establish our brand.”
There is a school of thought that says that in times of a crunch, people gravitate towards established brands in order to ensure the best for their buck. Entreprenuers like Mumbai-based Jay Singh, a former investment banker and India franchisee for Hard Rock Café, will be betting on this. His company, JSM, also owns an indigenous, luxury dining brand called Shiro (“castle” in Japanese; to make you feel like royalty) and plans to spend about Rs 20 crore on restaurants this financial year.
In Bangalore, a new outlet of Shiro opened recently, over 7,000 sq ft, with a 65 feet high ceiling (“space is luxury”) and Singh plans to take Hard Rock to Delhi (right after the elections), Hyderabad and Kolkata now. “The slowdown has not affected us much,” he says, admitting that corporate bookings have gone down. “At Hard Rock, we used to get parties celebrating quarterly results. Now we get farewells.” he says. What he does concede is that investments will shrink. “People who decided to park their profits here because it looked cool and sexy will not do so. Rich parents will not give their children money to open a nightclub."
Venture capitalists are out and there are no more PE fundings but consultant Manu Mohindra says if you do have the money, this is the time to invest: “Rentals are low, steel and cement prices are down, manpower is cheap and not seeking promotions.” Six months ago, you couldn’t have opened a restaurant in Rs 2 crore. Now you can, he says.
Mohindra estimates the number of new openings this year to be about 2,000, compared to last year’s 1,500. Of these, 100 will be “big” (more than 100 covers, our criterion here). He should know considering he and wife Sonia are handling many of these, including a Polynesian Tiki bar in Gurgaon, a huge 250-seater.
For people like you and me, the good news is that the accent is likely to be on value for money at these posh new places. “If the question is can everyone afford it, I would say obviously not, but many can,” says Alok Aggarwal , Rohit Bal’s partner in Cibo. The two had earlier partnered Veda, an Indian restaurant that saw critics tearing into it, and one of the lessons learnt was to do with pricing: “People wanted to be in an expensive looking restaurant but not in an expensive one,” Aggarwal says. He maintains, however, that they’ve not necessarily priced the restaurant to take the slowdown into account.
In Bangalore, chef and restaurateur Abhijeet Saha is more candid. A guest teacher at the Culinary Institute of America, Saha serves up the likes of a hand-cut pasta with beetroot foam or foie gras au torchon, a traditional preparation. His prices are 30 per cent cheaper than a five- star’s and he has kept profit margins down. “We have priced our dishes 15-20 per cent less than what we could have,” he says. Lunch at Rs 500 for a four-course meal is value for money. How will he maintain quality? That’s the question. On the other hand, the diners are not complaining.
