Monday, February 22, 2016

QSR startup Charcoal Biryani raises seed funding of $150,000 from Lion Ventures and Coverfox founders

21 FEBRUARY 2016
SINDHU KASHYAP
Source: yourstory.com

Yourstory-Charcoal-Biryani

Full-stack quick-service restaurant (QSR) venture Charcoal Biryani has raised a seed round of $150,000 led by LionVentures and from HNIs – Varun Dua, CEO of Coverfox, and Devendra Rane, CTO of Coverfox. Co-promoted by Anurag Mehrotra and Krishnakant Thakur from LionVentures, Mohammed Bhol, Mikhail Shahani and Gautam Singh, it started operations in Mumbai last September.
With this round of funding, the team is aiming to develop its technology for expansion. The company plans to scale it up to other cities like Bengaluru, Pune and NCR and become a pan-India brand and also add more products to its pipeline.
According to Varun of Coverfox, though it is a challenge to maintain consistency of food on a large scale in the QSR segment, Charcoal Biryani seems to have cracked it. “Also it has a strong product at its nucleus that is enabled by in-house technology,” he adds.
Amit Tambre, senior lawyer and investor in Charcoal Biryani, says that the team has covered all possible pain points in terms of scale, consistency and also has a strong focus on customer service.
Key members of the team include Rohit Mehrotra, Rohan Mehrotra and Areez Patel. Since inception, the company claims to have seen 15x growth in its daily average volumes, served 30,000 customers and has an impressive rate of 30-percent repeat orders.

YourStory take
The QSR model for different kinds of food is fast picking up. However, any company in the segment needs to crack the Domino’s model, to break into a large market. While there were talks of a slowdown in investments in the foodtech and food delivery space, the past two months of the new year have already seen three investments, apart from Charcoal Biryani. These include Freshmenu, WIMI and B9 Beverages, and Swiggy.
Indian consumers, especially those in the metros, are increasingly relying on ‘non-home cooked’ food, which has given rise to the new crop of foodtech startups, offering everything from fresh meals prepared by home chefs to home-delivered ready-to-cook ingredients, apart from doing restaurant deliveries.
However, the second-half of 2015 taught some lessons to the industry. With TinyOwl scaling back operations, Spoonjoy and few other startups shutting down, it is clear that these startups need to show that growth can be sustained at a lower burn.

Food-tech startup First Eat raises $200K in seed investment

Feb 21, 2016
DISHA SHARMA
Source: vccircle.com



The startup offers healthy meals on demand and on subscription basis in Gurgaon. Food­tech startup First Eat, run by F. E. Food Tech Pvt Ltd, has raised $200,000 (around Rs. 1.4 crore) in seed investment from an undisclosed serial investor, who is an F&B entrepreneur in Gurgaon.

The new capital will be used to expand operations in the NCR region, increase traction on the app, and also build the technology platform, Mannat Wadehra, co­founder, First Eat told Techcircle.in.

First Eat offers standardised and affordable healthy meals through its app, on both on-demand and subscription basis. The app allows users to choose meals according to their health requirements. The startup is currently functional only in Gurgaon.

The startup was founded by Saikat Bagchi, Shitiz Dogra, Mannat Wadehra and Rishabh Tickoo, and launched operations in November last year. Bagchi, Dogra, and Tickoo are alumni of MICA Ahmedabad, while Wadehra is from Great Lakes Institute of Management. Prior to founding the Startup, Bagchi worked with AbsolutData in the analytics and consumer insights sector, while Dogra worked at ONGC. Wadehra has previously worked in HCL and Infosys, while Tickoo has worked with InstaLabs and Global Delight.

The app has been downloaded 5000 times, and the startup claims to serve 80-­100 meals daily, with a repeat order rate of 77 per cent. The company is aiming to serve 400­-500 meals daily by next quarter.
“Our proposition is fairly simple; know what you need, have what you need and let us take care of it,” said Wadehra.

In the healthy meals delivery space, InnerChef Pvt Ltd, a ready ­to ­cook meals delivery startup floated by GSF Accelerator’s Rajesh Sawhney, has raised Rs 11 crore ($1.6 million) in pre­-Series A funding from Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Redbus co­founder Phanindra Sama, Shaadi.com’s Anupam Mittal and other tech investors. Other players include Faasos and Bite Club.

According to some estimates, about half of the food­tech firms operating in India started in the last one year. As per VCCEdge, 19 food­tech startups have raised about $160 million in venture capital funding so far in 2015. Only five companies managed to raise money twice. However, the food­tech industry is also witnessing tough times, with startups TinyOwl and Zomato laying off people, and others like Dazo and Eatlo shutting down.

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Food Tech Troubles: Frsh.com shuts shop in Noida and Delhi, axes 20 jobs

Feb 16, 2016
Varun Arora
Source: techcircle.in


Frsh2

Gurgaon-based Fingertip Foods Pvt Ltd, which runs online meal service startup Frsh.com, has closed its operations in Noida and Delhi, laying off 20 employees in the process.

The company will now focus on its operations in Gurgaon, where it will now aim to deliver orders within 30 minutes, against the earlier norm of one hour, Badal Goel, founder and CEO, Frsh.com told Techcircle.in.

According to Badal, it is difficult to run operations in three cities simultaneously when the company is going through a process change.

“It is a big process change and it is difficult to run operations in three cities simultaneously. We realised delivery is something we need to work on and we need to open more kitchens. When there is a big change, it is wastage of money, wastage of resources to operate in multiple locations,” Goel said.

“We realised that earlier we were promising one hour delivery time and one hour is too long. We realised we can’t ask customers to wait for that long and now we are working on the delivery time,” Goel said. “Earlier in Gurgaon, we had only one kitchen but now we will have multiple kitchens to bring down delivery time to 30 minutes.”

GrowX seed funds TableHero with $1M


February 16, 2016
Arti Singh
Source: vccircle.com

Burrp founder Deap Ubhi is one of the TableHero founders.

TableHero Technologies Pvt Ltd, which helps restaurants and hyperlocal businesses manage
their online presence, has secured $1 million (around Rs 6.82 crore) in seed funding led by Delhi ­based early ­stage investment firm GrowX Ventures.
The funding round also saw participation from FreeCharge founders Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon, IVFA partner and ex­ CEO of Network 18, Haresh Chawla, Powai Lake Ventures and equity crowdfunding platform Globevestor.
The money raised will be used for developing TableHero’s suite of tools, besides bolstering its engineering and product design teams, the startup said in a statement. “Our goal is to re­imagine the small local business technology stack in a way that makes technology invisible for small local business owners. The first product in this stack will be an intelligence ­driven, one ­click website maker for restaurants,” said Deap Ubhi, co ­founder and CEO, TableHero.
Ubhi, a serial entrepreneur who founded restaurant listings and review platform Burrp, served as FreeCharge’s COO when it was sold to Snapdeal last year. TableHero will initially launch its services in the US and target restaurants. It will focus on cities such as Portland, Seattle, the Bay Area and Los Angeles. Founded in 2014 by Deap Ubhi, Chetan Vaity, and Aman Prakash Mohla, TableHero claims
to build intelligent OS that simplifies website and digital presence management; reservations, bookings and appointments; and payments, loyalty and customer management. Other co­founders, Chetan Vaity and Aman Prakash Mohla, were part of the core engineering team at FreeCharge.
Sheetal Bahl, CEO, growX ventures, said, “We're investing in TableHero, above all, for the team. Deap is a star ­ he created Burrp, which we loved as consumers; ran Freecharge in a tough growth period, and; is one of the best product guys ever to have worked in India. And he's put together an amazing set of people to create a technology stack which has the potential to disrupt the long ­standing hegemony of the incumbents in the F&B tech space across geographies."
growX has invested in about 18 companies since its inception two ­and ­a ­half years ago, including Claro Energy, Mad Street Den, Quandl, and Locus.sh among others. In December 2015, growX invested in smart network layer platform i2e1. Bite Club, an online marketplace for chefs, raised an undisclosed amount in pre­ Series A funding from growX ventures.
Last year in August, Bangalore ­based Qyk Inc, which runs mobile marketplace for local services Qyk, secured $1 million in pre­Series A funding led by growX ventures.

Monday, February 15, 2016

Iconic Iyengars’ Bakery goes online

Feb 15, 2016
K.V.Aditya Bharadwaj
Source: The Hindu


 A screenshot of the new website

H.R. Sridhar, founder (centre), with his sons Raman (left) and Lakshmeesha in front of Iyengars’ Bakery at Austin Town in Bengaluru.— Photo: By Special Arrangement

H.R. Sridhar, founder (centre), with his sons Raman (left) and Lakshmeesha in front of Iyengars’ Bakery at Austin Town in Bengaluru.— Photo: By Special Arrangement

In the era of online shopping, why should that distinct, traditional evening snack of ‘aloo bun’ and ‘nippattu’ stay away from online delivery?

Not anymore. You can now order your ‘aloo bun’ online and get it home delivered from the iconic Bengaluru brand — Iyengars’ Bakery.

While there are several such bakeries in the city, Iyengars’ Bakery was one of the first to be started in 1981 in Austin Town. The bakery, which has patented the trade name, has now expanded with e-commerce service with Iyengarsbakery.com

Lakshmeesha, an engineer by training and second generation baker, and son of H.R. Sridhar, who started the bakery, is the man ushering in the change. Presently, the firm is delivering its products in 75 localities across the city for a minimum order of Rs. 200. The delivery charge is Rs. 30 for all purchases between Rs. 200 and Rs. 500, and free for orders above Rs. 500.

Mr. Lakshmeesha told The Hindu that on an average, they get 10 to 12 orders a day and it fluctuates depending on holidays, seasonal variations, and festivals. “The prices of our products are lower compared to other products being traded online. To make home delivery viable is the biggest challenge, which has forced us to take relatively large orders online,” he said.

The firm is now working to rope in other Iyengars’ bakeries in the city, to offer their products on the e-commerce platform. “Almost every area has an Iyengars’ Bakery today and we have identified around 100. This would be a formidable pan-city network to take on the might of the onslaught of processed foods and the new entrants,” Mr. Lakshmeesha said.

Talks with at least 20 such bakeries are under way, but the challenge is to bring a diverse set of players to agree on common terms, he said

Restaurant deals & events aggregator GoYaNo raises angel funding


GoYaNo's profile photo
Feb 15, 2016
Varun Arora
Source: techcircle.in

GoYaNo, an online marketplace for discovering events and restaurant deals, has raised around $50,000 (Rs 35 lakhs) in seed funding from Carclubindia.com founder Mukesh Kumar Gupta.

The startup will use the money raised to develop new products and expand its business, Nitin Sharma, co-founder of GoYaNo, told Techcircle.in.

GoYaNo, run by New Delhi-based GoYaNo Pvt Ltd, is a marketplace that enables restaurants, artists and event managers to list events and offers. It functions like a social platform where users can interact with their favorite restaurants and artists to form like-minded communities.

“The vision is to bring the entire events and food ecosystem under one social platform,” Sharma said.

The GoYaNo app was launched in December 2015. The company was started by Sharma and Gaurav Singh.  Both co-founders worked at Snapdeal and Sun Life Financial, before starting up.

The company is currently operational in Delhi and NCR. It claims to have tie ups with about 300 premium properties in the region and has facilitated restaurant and event deals for about 3,000 users, Sharma said. Customers can access the platform through the startup’s website and Android app.

GoYaNo wants to be present in six cities and cater to about 250,000 users by the current-year end, he added.

The company is in talks with angel networks and VC firms to close another round of funding.

GoYaNo would largely compete with horizontal deal aggregators (such as Little, Perksmap, Groupon, Zerch and others) and nightlife planning apps (such as OUWT,FNB City Media, Happitoo and others).

Little Internet Pvt Ltd, which owns the deals discovery app Little, recently raised an undisclosed amount in funding from Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC Pvt Ltd.

Mumbai-based Yagerbomb Media Pvt Ltd, which operates nightlife discovery platform OUWT, had secured $150,000 (around Rs 1 crore) from a group of undisclosed angel investors.

Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Zomato chief product officer Tanmay Saksena quits

February 9, 2016
Binu Paul
Source: Techcircle.in

Tanmay Saksena
Restaurant listings and services startup Zomato’s chief product officer Tanmay Saksena has quit in yet another senior-level exit at the company.

Saksena was promoted as chief product officer last month and just completed a year at Zomato, the Mint reported, citing a company spokesperson. He was the global business head for Zomato’s food-ordering business before becoming the product chief.

An email to the company seeking comment didn’t elicit any response till the time of filing this report. Saksena couldn’t be immediately contacted. Saksena joined Zomato in January 2015 after a four-year stint at Disney Social Games as vice president of its studio operations. He had previously worked with Unilever, Jambool, Trippert Inc. (acquired by Playdom Inc.) and Playdom Inc. (acquired by Disney Interactive).

A B.Tech graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, Saksena got an MBA from Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

Zomato has been facing difficulties in retaining top-level staff as several senior executives have left the firm after short stints.

In September last year, senior vice president for growth Durga Raghunath abruptly quit to become the CEO of book publishing startup Juggernaut after just a five-month stint with the firm. In July, former Facebook executive Namita Gupta quit as chief product officer at Zomato after just 11 months. That followed the exit of Rameet Arora, a former McDonald’s India executive, from Zomato after just six months as chief marketing officer.

Saksena’s departure comes just as the company announced that it had achieved operational break-even in six markets including India, the UAE, the Philippines and Indonesia.

However, the past few months have been challenging for Zomato. In October, Zomato said it was laying off around 300 employees across the globe, or nearly 10 per cent of its workforce. Most layoffs happened in its content teams across 22 countries.

Also in October, co-founder Goyal wrote to the company’s sales staff indicating that Zomato might fail to meet its sales target for the current financial year.

The company also tried to attract more eyeballs by advertising on porn sites. However, the move drew criticism on social media channels, compelling Zomato to withdraw the campaign. Earlier this month, Zomato shut down its food ordering business in four cities.

Monday, February 8, 2016

Zomato becomes profitable in six markets including India

February 8, 2016
Binu Paul
Source: techcircle.in

After a tremulous period towards the end of last year, restaurant listings and services startup Zomato Media Pvt Ltd has achieved operational break-even in six markets such as India, Middle East (UAE, Lebanon and Qatar) and Southeast Asia (Philippines and Indonesia).

VCCircle_Zomato7

This makes Zomato the first Indian ecommerce unicorn to become profitable in the home market. Unicorn is a new-age tag meant for startups sporting a $1 billion valuation.

Zomato did not disclose the revenue numbers.

“We have more than doubled our revenue year on year for the last few years and are going to post some great growth numbers this year as well. We are profitable in six of the 18 markets,” Deepinder Goyal, co-founder and CEO of Zomato, said in a press statement.

The company claimed that its India business accounts for 35 per cent of its revenue.

Founded in 2008 by IIT Delhi alumni and ex-Bain employees Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah, Zomato is now present in 23 countries and claims to be the market leader in 18 of them. The company has also made eight overseas acquisitions in various countries.

Its aggressive expansion drive last year began with the acquisition of Urbanspoon. The $52 million deal was the restaurant discovery and food ordering venture’s biggest inorganic bet and allowed it to venture into the US market. In April, Zomato launched Zomato Order, its separate app for food ordering. This pitted Zomato against entrenched food ordering startups such as Foodpanda, TinyOwl, Swiggy and others.

Chaddah has been leading Zomato’s foray into online ordering business and claims that the company now serves over 15,000 orders a day at an average ticket price of Rs 575.

“We can now channelise the profits to grow faster and compete harder in countries where we see significant competition. It’s a great thing that we don’t fully depend on external funds to fuel all the experiments and initiatives that we have undertaken in India and elsewhere,” Chaddah said.

Zomato has so far raised $225 million in external funding from prominent investors such as Info Edge, Sequoia India, Vy Capital and Temasek.

The last couple of months have been challenging for Zomato. In October last year, Zomato said it was laying off around 300 employees across the globe, or nearly 10 per cent of its workforce. Most layoffs happened in its content teams across 22 countries. Zomato has also been facing difficulties in retaining top-level staff as many senior executives have left the firm after short stints.

Again in October, Goyal sent an email to the company’s sales staff, indicating that Zomato may fail to meet its sales target for the current financial year.

The company also tried to attract more eyeballs by advertising on porn sites. However, the move drew a barrage of criticism from social media channels, compelling Zomato to withdraw the campaign. Early this month, Zomato shut down its food ordering business in four cities.

Taking a potshot at Zomato for playing up profitability in select markets while it’s still being a non-profitable company in a majority of its markets, startup investor and Seedfund co-founder Mahesh Murthy wrote on his social media pages, “So Zomato announces it is profitable in some regions but not most, and not at head office or company level. I guess we’ll now wait for Flipkart to announce they’re profitable in Lakshadweep.”

Sunday, February 7, 2016

Chef Qureshi of ITC hotels in a 2016 Padma Shri awardee

Jan 30 2016
Reshmi Dasgupta
Source: The Economic Times (Bangalore)

Silk Stalkings - INTANGIBLE HERITAGE

The inclusion of Chef Qureshi, ITC hotel's Grand Master Chef, in the 2016 list of Padma Shri awardees is a welcome but belated recognition that culinary art is on par with other fine and performing arts. Finally our culinary artistes are given a big hand! When conferring the prestigious l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (the French equivalent of a Padma Shri) on six young chefs in 2012, France's then culture minister Frederic Mitterrand had said, “The inclusion in 2010 of the French gastronomic meal in UNESCO's list of Intangible Heritage illustrates the importance of the culinary heritage of our culture and its international influence.“ That same year, Silk Stalkings noted India's lacuna in recognising the national contribution of our great chefs including Imtiaz Qureshi given that the legendary Julia Child had just been conferred the US Presidential Medal of Freedom (the highest civilian honour for achievements in culture, politics, science, sports and business), to add to her Légion d'Honneur and the l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from France.

Since our own Padma awards are modelled on Britain's multitiered ones, I also mentioned that a clutch of British chefs have been conferred their nation's highest honours. Indeed, not only have Jamie Oliver, the Roux brothers, Gordon Ramsay and others got MBEs and OBEs, several have even been given CBEs the equivalent of Padma Vibhushan such as Delia Smith and Loyd Grossman.

The inclusion of Chef Qureshi the venerable “face“ of dum pukht cuisine and ITC hotel's Grand Master Che in the 2016 list of Padma Shri awardees is therefore historic. For it means that India has finally officially recognised that what our great chefs have mastered is not mere cooking or catering but culinary art, on par with the talented exponents of other fine and performing arts In terms of sheer wealth of culinary heritage, India does not lag behind any nation in the world. Indeed, the sheer antiquity of our multifarious cuisines and their remarkably insightful principles and philosophies should be the subject of continuous deep academic research. But that can only happen if there only happen if there is awareness of and consequent respect for cuisine as an aspect of culture in India.

For the longest time, the promotion and development of Indian cuisine had been left to hospitality groups. It is fortuitous that  ITC Hotels, for instance, and the visionary Habib Rehman, soldiered on with rediscovering, researching and showcasing regional cuisines at a time when Indian food was seen as little more than amorphous orange-coloured curries and skewered tandoori meats.

Honouring the octogenarian Chef Qureshi whose engagement with food started at the age of 7 when he was apprenticed in a kitchen as the first culinary recipient of a Padma award is also significant in another way. As an alumnus of the experiential school of cooking, rather than a formal institute, he epitomises the life story of countless other great Indian exponents of culinary arts. The most prized possession of western (and Japanese) chefs are their collections of knives. They are also the proud accumulators of all sorts of gadgets and gizmos for their sauces and cooking techniques. Years ago,
when I asked Chef Qureshi what he regarded as his most precious implement, he held up his right hand. “Sab kuch toh isi sey kartey hain,“ he'd said with a smile.

This instinctive cooking from the proportion of masalas and consistency of mixes to the shape and texture of ingredients is the common hallmark of our varied Indian cuisines. And up till very recently the greatest exponents had to learn it the age-old way, as apprentices from a tender age.Consequently many lacked the wherewithal to document or communicate their knowledge.

That is possibly why cuisine had so far been ignored as aspect of culture and an effective tool of soft power, that has both national and commercial benefits. Now that the President himself will soon pin that precious medal on a senior exponent of this ancient art, hopefully the culture ministry and other nodal bodies will also join hospitality groups in giving Indian cuisines pride of place.

Countless people around India and the world have experienced the magic of Chef Qureshi's
inimitable right hand for decades. There are many more of his vintage and younger including an enormously talented new generation of innovative and articulate Indian chefs who also deserve national recognition and hopefully more Padma awards will come their way in the future.

Having them showcase their talent at Rashtrapati Bhavan and at the official banquets given by the Prime Minister and other dignitaries here and abroad would also be a natural corollary to this most welcome first step. It would be an eloquent affirmation cuisine as an integral part of India's intangible heritage (as much as France's!) and as a powerful magnet for tourism and even national integration.

Saturday, February 6, 2016

How much can you earn as salary if you create something like Starbucks

Jan 28 2016
Source: : The Economic Times (Bangalore). Bloomberg

HOWARD SCHULTZ'S PAY EQUALS 9 MILLION ESPRESSO MACCHIATOS


One espresso macchiato costs $2.25.
Schultz's annual pay is $20.1 mn
It's still a lot of java.Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz received $20.1 million in reported compensation last year, the Seattle-based company said in a filing Monday. Measured in his favourite beverage, the value of his pay is enough to buy almost nine million espresso macchiatos -or 24,400 each day for a year.
The Italian-style macchiato, made up by two shots of espresso and a touch of steamed milk foam, sells for $2.25 at the Starbucks in Seattle, where the company has its headquarters.

Friday, February 5, 2016

Manu Chandra: raising the bar

Feb 7, 2016

Sumana Mukherjee
LiveMint, Bangalore


How the chef-restaurateur broke the rules, set the standards, and made fine-dining fun

Manu Chandra at the Olive Beach kitchen, Bengaluru. Photo: Kunal Chandra
Manu Chandra at the Olive Beach kitchen, Bengaluru. Photo: Kunal Chandra
Toast & Tonic, the words are etched out in yellow in a clean font, suspended behind a pale wood bar. The wall, in the same colour scheme, is stacked with bottles of wine and spirits. The island flooring, in contrast, is tiled in coral, cyan and black, demarcated from the weathered wooden sleeper floor that sweeps up to the bar.
The sleepers are the only things I recognize on stepping inside. Gone are the spacious booths built around broad wooden tables, the electric vibe, the basement foosball table. Almost overnight, it seems, someone has created this subtle, sophisticated, sexy space that—even before serving its first customer—teems with whispered confidences.
Standing at the bar for the photographer, a glass of his customary red in his hand, Manu Chandra cuts his usual quiet figure. He takes instruction unsmilingly but sportingly, sends a staffer scurrying with a raised brow and exudes an authority that leaves no one in doubt as to who’s really in charge here. He owns the space, literally and figuratively. Monkey Bar, Chandra’s flagship gastropub on Wood Street, Bengaluru, is now Toast & Tonic, a local/artisan-focused, definitively non-Indian concept restaurant. It opens 15 February.
If contemporary urban life is forever in search of the next excitement, Chandra, 35, is the ace futurist. His domain is the most vibrant section of the organized food and beverage industry, where he writes cross-cultural menus, creates design-oriented spaces and almost single-handedly expands the mid-market—a zone where per-person spending is between Rs.800 and Rs.1,800—while, somehow, continuing to be among the country’s top three chefs.
Toast & Tonic is the year’s first addition to the Chandra-helmed Olive Cafés South Pvt. Ltd’s eight-outlet portfolio. In its third year (2014-15), the company increased its turnover by 200% and is projecting another 50% growth in the current fiscal, to about Rs.45 crore.
That last bit may not mean much to many, but if you live in Mumbai, New Delhi or Bengaluru, appreciate a mean cocktail and a good menu, chances are you’ve visited Olive Cafés South’s restaurants Monkey Bar and The Fatty Bao; the former is to open in Kolkata later this year as well. Distinct as the spaces and their offerings are, they have in common individualistic decor, accessible pricing and, perhaps most importantly, an effortless sky-high cool factor.
That last borrows liberally from the persona of Chandra himself. Intelligent, creative and charismatic enough to be on the speed-dial of fashion editors (despite his preferred attire of chequered shirts and jeans), as a chef-restaurateur he is something of an aberration in an industry where success is frequently a flash in the pan and burnouts are more common than broken crockery. How does Manu Chandra break all the rules and set the standards? And, having raised the bar(s), why is he looking West?
*********************************************************************************It was 2004. Stand-alone restaurants seeking to liberate fine-dining from the grip of five-star hotels were still feeling their way around the country. Nearly 10 years earlier, Arjun Sajnani had set up Sunny’s in Bengaluru, but its impact was limited to the southern city. In 1999, Rahul Akerkar opened Indigo; his location in Mumbai, coupled with his interpretation of European food, shook up ideas of what dining out could be like in India. The city’s restaurant credentials were reinforced further the next year, when flamboyant entrepreneur AD Singh threw open the Greek island-referencing Olive Bandra. Its success encouraged Singh’s team to take the brand to Delhi, where Ritu Dalmia was flying the flag with Diva, also set up in 2000.
It was in Delhi, in the sprawling refurbished sarai (inn) housing Olive Mehrauli, that Singh met Chandra in 2004. “Back then, there weren’t a lot of cool kids coming back to India,” remembers Singh one late afternoon in Bengaluru. “Manu, with his academic record and work experience in the US, was my kind of a guy. We connected and he joined us. The hard part came after that: finding the right path for him. It happened almost serendipitously.”
Until that meeting, Chandra himself had been in two minds: Following his associate degree from The Culinary Institute of America (CIA), Hyde Park, New York, in 2002—he was class valedictorian—he had worked in some of New York City’s most respected fine-dining kitchens, including an apprenticeship at Café Centro and stints at Daniel, Le Bernardin, Gramercy Tavern and Jean-Georges, and was part of the opening team at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Manhattan—the culinary equivalent to being a ground scientist on a space mission. But at 24, and earning very well, he was also aware that if he went back to the US and worked towards his goal of “opening a fancy French restaurant”, he would probably never come back.
Chandra in New York.
Chandra in New York.

“I would earn 5% of my US salary, but AD’s offer sounded fascinating: opening my own restaurant or taking charge of a restaurant,” says Chandra. “So I joined them and, for a year, didn’t cash my pay cheques, till the company realized that my remuneration was a joke and revised it.”
The quiescence over the salary, however, was no indication that Singh’s newest recruit would not be shaking things up. Stationed in Mumbai, Chandra’s first presentation to the board of directors was a graphic PowerPoint of the Olive kitchen, then in the charge of a disengaged expat chef. “There were rats, naked wires, 10 appliances drawing power from a single decrepit point, grimy walls, torn uniforms.... I pointed out the problems, offered solutions and told them they had to invest seriousness—and money—into their infrastructure and chefs for the sake of their own brand,” Chandra recalls. “It was a defining moment in my relationship with the company; it also saw the foundation of relationships that last till this day, be it with equipment vendors or Chetan Rampal, then the restaurant general manager.”
It also marked out Chandra as the man to watch. Entrusted to build Olive Beach in Bengaluru in 2005, soon after Olive Bandra had begun making news for the first time for its food, the young chef de cuisine used his Mumbai experience to design his own kitchen, travelling to Alang, Gujarat, to scour the ship-breaking yards for second-hand equipment and customizing refrigerators. “In 10 years, that kitchen hasn’t needed an upgrade,” Chandra says. “And, in fact, I’ve designed every subsequent kitchen we’ve set up as well. I’m self-taught, but manufacturers now listen to what I say—my fridge design has become something of a benchmark—simply because my suggestions work, instead of just following the norm.”
*********************************************************************************
For one of India’s foremost foreign-trained chefs, Chandra uses the term “self-taught” liberally in the several hours I spend conversing with him. It is a pattern that carries over from his privileged childhood on Malcha Marg, in the heart of Lutyens’ Delhi. Growing up with grandmothers who needed to be escorted to the Sarojini Nagar wet market, aunts who were fabulous cooks, retainers who tested his olfactory abilities, Chandra picked up early the essentiality of food in the fabric of life, as also its comforting powers. here for enlar

And not just at home. “The first meal Manu ever cooked away from home was at my birthday party in the eighth grade; he made chowmein for 20 kids,” says Nitin Kumar, his friend since they were 4, and now an electronics engineer based in Munich, Germany. “Later, as we grew older, he would spend every new year’s eve in the kitchen at our place, probably preferring it to socializing. Some of the kids would hang out with him, and he would be instructing them on when to turn the kebabs, making chutneys, then sending out the food with one of the boys. Oh, and he always cleaned up after, which made my mum happy.
"Culinary school might have seemed predestined for someone with an obvious feel for food, but the erudite, enterprising Chandra family didn’t take to the idea. “After my class XII, I still went ahead and cleared all the hotel management institute entrance tests. Chatting with some kids in Manipal, the talk turned to drugs and how this was the best place to score, and I felt this was not where I wanted to be. Meanwhile, I had got into St Stephen’s (in Delhi University) with history honours, and my grandmother, for one, was relieved that I wasn’t going to be a bawarchi (cook).”
Alongside college, however, Chandra continued to cook for family and friends and then landed his first paying gig, at Café Turtle in the still-unhip Khan Market. “I would be going to college all week and cooking through the night at home to be ready with the weekend specials, stuff like pastas and quiches and salads.... So, technically, I was the first chef in Khan Market, after Khan Chacha.”
The dedication paid off in more ways than one. Besides giving Chandra his first hands-on experience at sourcing, shopping, prepping, cooking and serving meals for money, it convinced his family that his future did lie in chef school. And so it was off to the CIA with “a fairly fat scholarship” for a 21-month course.
Family friend Paul Metrakos, who took Chandra under his wing during his New York stint, remembers greeting “a skinny young kid, who was so cold, so cold”, fresh off the plane. Chandra, also a gifted writer, has described the experience thus: “Paul... picked me up in his massive pickup truck, and we drove towards Manhattan. As if on cue, the radio started playing Billy Joel’s New York State Of Mind as the car rolled up the steep motorway near Queens and then up to the highest point, where suddenly the entire Manhattan skyline came into view. Something told me that I was going to love this town.”
The theoretical education at CIA was complemented by Metrakos’ personal tutelage, as the Manhattan native set about introducing the impressionable Indian to the best of the city. “This kid, he wanted to swallow New York whole,” booms Metrakos over Skype one evening, recounting how they sampled everything from pastas at Bar Pitti in West Village to traditional Greek feasts at his sister’s in Astoria.
Halfway through the first year, a classmate urged Chandra to enter a seafood competition. “So I made up two recipes, one with salmon and one with black cod. And, much to my surprise, the cod got shortlisted. I was super-nervous, there were some really big guys—Eric Ripert, Rick Moonen, Michael Lomonaco, Marcus Samuelsson—judging the Seafood Masters Awards (in 2002).
“My cod had the quintessentially Indian flavours of raw mustard oil, kashundi, ajwain, methi seeds, but very subtly, just brushed over the fish. Ten seconds on each side was all it took to cook on parchment in a super-heated pan. I served it with a rice made with clove and coconut and the dehydrated fish skin and, I think, a fresh coriander oil. The judges loved it. The other contestants were doing some crazy stuff—the modernist trend was just taking root—so I was gobsmacked when I won. The prize was an all-expense-paid apprenticeship in Oslo (Norway).”
For the semester-long sojourn, Chandra picked Bagatelle, then the only two Michelin-star restaurant in Scandinavia. “It was very different to anything I had seen in the US. I was fascinated by à la carte operations in a good restaurant: minimal presentations, details in garnishing, seasonality, locally sourced stuff and, most of all, like-minded, passionate people. The experiential restaurants were doing incredible things. Trond Moi’s, for instance, was working with aromas: A plate would arrive with a hot emulsification of vanilla and honey and you would smell dessert but you would be eating scallops.”
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For all of Chandra’s wide and varied exposure while in the US and Europe, the one element his culinary training skipped was a specialization: The CIA provided an excellent foundation; his restaurant experience covered French, Mediterranean and Japanese, adding to a brief, not entirely pleasant, apprenticeship at Dum Pukht at the ITC Maurya, Delhi. In retrospect, however, it was the most liberating part of his formal education and an immediate differentiator in India.ick here for enlar

At the Olive Beach in Bengaluru, Chandra expanded the popular definition of Mediterranean as Italian to include takes on Moroccan—tagines made one of their early non-five star appearances—French, Greek, Basque and Turkish. Monkey Bar saw funky interpretations of Indian dishes, from a straight-up Coorg pandi curry and Bombay Vada Pav to a Butter Chicken Khichdi and a Sorpotel Jam Pot. The Fatty Bao had Chandra adventuring in East Asia, introducing variations on the ramen and the bao, sexing up the massaman and amping up oysters with chorizo and a citrusy ponzu.

"No. I don;t identify with any cuisine," Chandra responds definitively to my question. “But I associate myself with any cuisine that I can cook with some level of competence and if I apply myself, I’m usually able to pull that off. Food, for me, is an endless discovery trip. My chefs use The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide To Culinary Creativity. I don’t need it—I am the flavour bible. I also have a certain expertise with techniques and I marry the two. I like complexity, I like layering—adding Bengali panch phoron or the Kodava kachampuli or even fresh ajwain leaves to an unexpected dish. That is what gets me trying new stuff. Because, unfortunately, the repertoire of supply chains is limited.
“For instance,” Chandra’s enthusiasm warms up the January afternoon, “the price points wouldn’t allow us to get the highest quality pork for Monkey Bar. So we had to raise whatever was available with great technique: We braised the pork very slowly for six-and-a-half hours and then, before serving, reheated it gently: It just melted in the mouth.”

That brings us neatly to the Manu Chandra signature, an odd signature, some would say, given his background and training: comfort food. “Yes, as far as my regular menus are concerned, I try to keep comfort at the forefront. Popping flavours, some element of surprise, yes, but I wouldn’t take away comfort for the sake of shock and awe,” he says.
“Take a pizza which does phenomenally well here at Olive Beach. It’s got bacon, pepperoni, fennel, crushed coriander—it’s essentially a spicy Italian sausage deconstructed. It has layers of complexity and flavours. But it’s not as if I’m pushing the layers on to you... It would be different if I was doing special menus. Then I would tread upon the other side, for I’m curating an experience you’ve signed up for. On a normal day, that may not be the case.”
Clients across the country will testify, however, that a Manu Chandra-curated meal is rather special. From one such meal five years ago, when Chandra had just started focusing on local produce (which earned him the sobriquet of St Bathua in some quarters), I still remember the impossibly silky drumstick velouté, a bathua ravioli and a jackfruit pudding. A recent celebratory dinner marked his evolution on the local/seasonal theme, using gondhorajlemons, ponk, nolen gur, nati kottambari soppu (indigenous coriander) with Bandel cheese, eggs, beef briskets and assorted other proteins. But, in the run-up, what had Chandra really excited was koji, a yeast developed in Japan from rice inoculated with the spores of a mould (Aspergillus oryzae), which imparts an incomparable umami flavour to food.
Ironically, it is also from the very satisfied clients at these events—for events they are—that one of the most trenchant criticisms of Chandra arises. He is demonstrably brilliant, they say, so why is the food in his restaurants, even at Olive Beach, merely good?
Among them is leading technology lawyer Rahul Matthan, who focuses his holidays around food and likes to end a working day abroad with a pre-booked dinner at a recommended restaurant, starred or otherwise. “Manu is someone I trust and he has produced many memorable meals for me—I particularly recall a fancy dress party in which no dish was what it appeared to be—but I don’t eat the food off his menus,” he says. “All of them cater to the lowest common denominator (within his client base). Monkey Bar and The Fatty Bao target the younger crowd with tasty food, but they don’t address the older, sophisticated people. Manu is extremely creative, with a wide range of talents. He conceptualizes food very well, and his food, even at Olive Beach, can never be bad—merely ordinary.”
ick here for enlIt is criticism that surprises Singh. “I think what defines the Olive Beach menu is what Manu thinks his audience is looking for—and that’s not 100 people, but 1,000 or 5,000 people,” he says. “What keeps him from doing more modern, or more edgy, food is not time or ability or even crew, but figuring out the right level to peg the menu so that you can dish it out every day and please the audience you’re aiming for.”
Interestingly, it was a need to enlarge that audience that saw Singh facing the prospect, in 2007-08, of losing his two best men, Rampal and Chandra.

Close in age, workaholics by temperament and complementary in nature, Singh’s top operations man and his best chef realized that, committed as they were to the Olive brand, it was not where the future lay. “By then, I had been with Olive Bandra for 10-12 years and I had seen the clientele change. I realized that Olive, while a great product, had its limitations—it was not what the young people wanted,” says Rampal during a one-on-one in Bengaluru. “I’ve long believed that young urban Indians will slowly cease to cook at home: They’ll eat out or do a takeaway. And for that they don’t need Olive—that’s for anniversaries and birthdays. The casual-dine, mid-level segment was where they would go and where we had to be.”
Chandra agreed entirely. So the two of them went to Singh with the idea of floating their own company. Singh, the consummate businessman, quickly suggested a subsidiary within the Olive family to forge the new enterprises. Rampal and Chandra have a 20% share each in Olive Cafés South, while the rest is held by the parent company. It aggressively targets the 20- and 30-somethings, the same band solicited by rivals such as Social, Smoke House Deli (both run by Riyaaz Amlani’s Impresario) and, to a certain extent, Anjan Chatterjee’s Mezzuna.
Brie Tempura at The Fatty Bao. Photo courtesy Sanjay Ramchandran
Brie Tempura at The Fatty Bao. Photo courtesy Sanjay Ramchandran
“With Monkey and, more so, Fatty, I have upped the level of the mid-market, stretching it into the luxury segment,” Chandra says without false modesty. “I am a chef first, but I’m a chef who is very, very conscious of the fact that he works for an establishment that needs to make money. A Manish Mehrotra can afford to run an Indian Accent because he has a Rohit Khattar’s support. If I had 75 successful restaurants behind me, I could do a 25-cover supremely fine-dining place and charge Rs.10,000 per head, but I don’t. I’ve had to roll with the punches and teach myself the business the hard way.”
Among Olive Cafés South’s significant missteps, the most prominent was LikeThatOnly (LTO), a quirky, Anshu Arora Sen-designed Asian-inspired bar and restaurant that opened in the Bengaluru suburb of Whitefield in July 2012 and closed down in February 2014. “I’ve never been able to figure out why it didn’t work, except that I know I should’ve spent more time there—but I just couldn’t drag myself to Whitefield every day,” says Chandra. “Essentially, it was that: It was difficult to get staff there, there was no power, no water, the rents were high. It had some confident cooking, but LTO is the reminder that that’s not all it takes for a restaurant to work. But I channelled 55-60% of the menu into The Fatty Bao.

Chandra, A.D. Singh and Chetan Rampal (extreme right) playing foosball at the Monkey Bar in Delhi’s Connaught Place. Photo courtesy Kunal Chandra

Chandra, A.D. Singh and Chetan Rampal (extreme right) playing foosball at the Monkey Bar in Delhi’s Connaught Place. Photo courtesy Kunal Chandra
“Monkey Bar at Connaught Place, New Delhi, too was a massive miscalculation: CP has a higher density of restaurants than Hauz Khas and there are massive crowds, but they look for formula eateries and cheap liquor—definitely not Monkey.”
There are concerns, too, that with eight outlets and counting, plus Olive Beach, where he continues to be executive chef, Chandra is spreading himself too thin. His stoutest defence comes, ironically, from Amlani. “He’s not going as fast as he should,” says the chief executive officer and managing director of Impresario Entertainment and Hospitality Pvt. Ltd and president of the National Restaurant Association of India. “I think his base in Bengaluru puts him at a slight disadvantage. Also, he’s a perfectionist.”
Popularly perceived as a loner—his most constant companion is his handsome Labrador, Rocco—Chandra himself believes his secret sauce is great team-building. “I’m there at the conceptualization, the execution, the standardization and the launch. Beyond that, I don’t peg my products so high that my skills are necessary round-the-clock,” comes the ready answer. “I believe in developing teams; my core guys, including chefs Prashanth Puttaswamy (of The Fatty Bao) and Varun Pereira (Monkey Bar), have been with me for 10-odd years.”
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At the end of an intense 3-hour-long conversation, punctuated by mugs of black coffee for him and espressos for me, I resist the urge to laugh out loud when Chandra rather ruefully confesses that he was once rejected for a job “by the psychologist at the Marriott, Chicago, because she thought I was an overachiever”.
Two well-established brands built from scratch, a third in the works, Chandra and Rampal are now looking at London following a reconnaissance mission late last year. “It’s time to take the India story out,” Singh had said of the plans. Chandra is more forthright: “We are excited about London, but it is not about fame. Without wanting to brag, I was recognized in three or four Indian restaurants that we walked into—which means they are keeping an eye on what’s happening here. Do I need to go to London to accomplish anything? No. Is it a good market? Yes. Could I do a lot more things over there that I can’t here? Perhaps—and, for me, that’s exciting.
“If I want to do a great cocktail, for instance, I would say, give me cherry bitters, give me Chartreuse and a dash of Bénédictine and I think I would have just what I’m looking for—I can do that there, I can’t do it here; they’re just not available, they never will be, because the market doesn’t exist. If I want a really nice Atlantic halibut to cook in a certain way, I could get it there. Could I get it here? Possibly, and it would be great, but I would be thinking, imagine if I had that.... I can’t possibly do all that here, which is why the draw of a London or a New York is so much more from a creative perspective.”
Perhaps for the first time in the nine-odd years I’ve known Chandra, I hear a note of wistfulness in his words. We’ll lose you again, I tease him. “I don’t know. But I can’t keep holding back all my creative output because there’s no one who will buy into it. That’s why I envy painters and writers. Your products aren’t dependent on others’ skills,” he says. “An Imtiaz Qureshi may get a Padma Shri, but, all said and done, the benchmarks in the commercial space are ridiculously low. And I am never content with what I do because it can always be better. That’s what I aspire to.”

RAPID FIRE
10 hard questions 
YOUR FAVOURITE DISH OF ALL TIME, FROM ANYWHERE
‘Mutthi’ (fist) kebab, the original meatball cooked in yogurt, a family recipe. Addictive!
FAVOURITE DISH FROM YOUR OWN RESTAURANTS
Jackfruit Biryani, Monkey Bar
THE PERFECT 1AM MEAL
Chips followed by noodles, usually at 2.30am
THE MOST SURPRISING CITY/TOWN TO EAT IN
Indore
THE MOST UNUSUAL THING YOU’VE EVER EATEN
Whale carpaccio at the docks in Oslo. It was like a fishy ‘wagyu’
THE KITCHEN SKILL YOU WISH YOU HAD
Folding and rolling dim sums
THE PERFECT DATE, ANYONE AND ANYWHERE IN HISTORY
Dorothy Parker at the Tavern on the Green (New York)—her acrid observations would be funnier than a stand-up any day
YOUR POST-WORK UNWINDER OF CHOICE
Binge-watching TV shows from a few seasons ago. Not Indian
RON ZACAPA OR OLD MONK?
Wine
ONE WORD TO DESCRIBE YOURSELF
Unpredictable