AmRest Holdings SE, the largest independent restaurant operator in central and eastern Europe, is planning on opening a chain of restaurants in India serving Italian cuisine with its first outlet set to open before middle of next year.
The company which owns franchisees of six brands including Pizzahut, KFC and Starbucks, is planning to open five to ten restaurants of the La Tagliatella brand in India over the next one to two years.
A breakaway from the regular trend adopted by multi national companies from the service industry of only lending its brand, AmRest is investing between Euro 1-2 million (Rs 7 crore) per restaurant and has tentatively kept aside Rs 500 crore for expansions.
Henry McGovern, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of AmRest Holdings said, "There is high acceptance of Italian food here but we haven't seen of something truly authentic Italian offered in the local market. Our chain will offer quality Italian food along with the right ambience".
India would be the company's first venture outside Europe followed by China in later months. The 1993-founded company has 665 quick service and casual dining restaurants presently.
About 120 La Tagliatella restaurants are already open of which 19 were to be opened this year. The company targets 40-50 new restaurants next year. These will be medium-sized restaurants having space of 4,000-6,000 sqft and which seats 150-200 guests. The company makes all its pastas, ice-creams, desserts in-house.
Like most popular eating joints AmRest too is looking at opening its outlets at shopping malls and other recreation areas, in addition to stand-alone outlets. The company has initiated talks with a few partners but have not begun actual work on any property. "We have started work on supply chain", added McGovern.
Like other examples of 'Indianisation' of popular western brands such as McDonalds, Subway, Pizzahut, amRest will also look to infuse the Indian taste to at a few of its products. However, this will be based on the consumer feedback and will be done at a later stage.
"We'll let the customer decide that. We wont change the brand for India but we will look to have local development of our food as we develop scale, may be there will be some local Indian additions that come in. We will certainly respond to customer tastes", McGovern.
