If global headlines have been hogged by the Facebook IPO, for the restaurant and the larger retail industry in India, table talk has centred around another public offering. Anjan Chatterjee?s Speciality Restaurants has become the first Indian restaurant company to go public, with its oversubscribed IPO clearly showing that the appetite for this business in India is growing.
While Speciality Restaurants, which owns popular indigenous brands like Mainland China and Oh! Calcutta, is now arguably the largest home-grown restaurant company in the country (69 restaurants and R175 crore in revenues), its public offering only underscores the coming of age of large Indian restaurant companies.
It does not take studies to show us that the chunk of the business in the country is still unorganised. India has always had a tradition of mom-and-pop, family run restaurants?whether it is the cook making his reputation, and revenues, selling kheer in a bylane of Shahjahanabad or the family-run restaurants of the 1980s and 1990s, or indeed the more recent lot of solo enterprises set up by passionate foodies who chucked their day jobs to venture into this tricky terrain.
While all these are still part of the landscape, in the last five years the business of restaurants has been changing tremendously?and becoming, for want of a better term, more corporatised. Instead of the erratic workings of a single-owner/chef-driven restaurant, we now have well-structured entities with professionals at the helm.
Speciality Restaurants apart, some of the biggest indigenous restaurant companies today include the Amit Burman-Alok Aggarwal promoted Litebite Foods (with brands such as Zambar and Punjab Grill), Mumbai restaurateur Riyaz Amlani?s Impressario that has also been rapidly expanding its footprint (in Delhi itself, two if its latest ventures range from the Smoke House Room to Trishna), AD Singh?s Olive Bar and Kitchens (a new venture in the form of gastropub Monkey Bar has opened this week in Bangalore, but more on that later), Ashish Kapur?s Yo! China with operations in the smallest of towns, the Bangalore-headquartered BJN group with more than 40 restaurants, not to mention ambitious companies like the Punjab-based Alchemist with interests in food processing, hospitality are more rapidly occupying the restaurant space.
While we may be seduced by the romance of the individualistic, small restaurant run more on passion than sound business sense, fact is that this growing corporatisation of the Indian restaurantscape has done a world of good to the quality of our own experiences as consumers. From standardised service to prices and food quality, restaurants that treat their businesses with respect and not some whimsical pastime, obviously are much more competent. With legit business models in place, there is also less chance of these shutting shop after the first three or six months when the owners begin to realise the capital-intensive nature of the business.
With a firm structure in place, say after a VC funding, it not only becomes easier to expand but also invest resources into channeling creativity. The latest example of this is Monkey Bar, India?s first gastropub, from the Olive stable. The ?gastropub? has taken its time arriving in India?though ideally with our penchant for casual yet aspirational dining, it should have been here earlier. Globally, the gastropub?evidently, it connotes a pub taking its food seriously?came into existence in the early 1990s, with the Eagle in London ushering in a decade-long boom. The early 2000s saw the gastropub extend its reach to fashionable New York and California quarters until the global financial crisis and people spending less money on food dimmed its prospects. However, last year, the Michelin Red Guide made it fashionable again, elevating the Hand and Flowers in Marlow to a two-star rating; the first such for a British pub, in its list for 2012.
So, if you are into global trends, the gastropub is still quite ?with it?. What?s better is that it has finally arrived on our own shores in Bangalore with the irreverent, casual Monkey Bar. No reservations are needed to get into this funky, distressed-walls space. And drinks and food are both quirky. Ideas and individualistic expression get grounded in an organisational structure.
In the end, as the Indian restaurant biz grows larger, a sound organisation and a quirky creative sense may not always be divorced.
The writer is a food critic