Interview/ Manu Chandra, chef & restaurateur
You may not see Manu Chandra on reality cook shows or hawking his line of ladles and spatulas, but that has not stood in the way of this Delhi-born, New York-bred, Bengaluru resident from becoming a ‘celebrity’ chef who has won multiple ‘Chef of the Year’ awards and been noticed by the likes of The New York Times and Time magazine.
After picking up the tricks of the trade from the prestigious Culinary Institute of America and a stint with the Michelin-starred Norwegian chef Eyvind Hellstrom, Chandra returned to India to join Olive Beach in Bengaluru in the mid-2000s. He has not looked back since, and became chef-partner with the likes of Monkey Bar, Fatty Bao and Toast & Tonic.
Right after the pandemic, Chandra left the Olive Group and started his independent business in partnership with longtime colleague Chetan Rampal. The business includes Lupa, an expansive restaurant in Bengaluru, and a bespoke catering set up and a digital creative studio. Excerpts from an exclusive interview:
Q/ How do you effortlessly straddle the spheres―being a chef, restaurateur and entrepreneur?
A/ Chefs, by virtue of what the profession is, are a very passionate masochistic bunch of people who chase perfection and not necessarily bottom lines. That can mar the development of a great business. A lot of good businessmen have been able to capture the sentiment that a chef possesses and then navigate it in the right direction to make sure that you’re running a tenable business as well as a great food and beverage outlet. Or vice versa.
I have been fortunate enough to be the sort of chef who always knew that bottom lines were important. I understood that I will be in charge of the business and not just the kitchen, and I think I’ve always viewed a lot of what I’ve done in the past from that prism. I think that has stood me in good stead as a businessman from my previous role where I was answerable to a lot of directors.
Q/ Can you take us through your many restaurant ventures; what is it that has worked for all these places; why is it that one place works when another doesn’t?
A/ Let us start with my very first one, Olive, which I joined as an employee. I was aware that I was in a country that was still nascent as far as fine dining restaurants were concerned. Even whatever existed in the five star space was well behind the curve from what was happening globally. And here I came swashbuckling from New York saying that I was just going to take whatever I loved in New York and plant it in India and expect it to be magical. That was when reality hit me, realising that a fine dining western restaurant in a city like Bengaluru was not something that the customer was ready to accept.
The initial rejection rate is much higher than you had anticipated. But I also realised that you cannot be blind to the business of things. And any market is only going to evolve. I think I take a lot of strength from that in saying that you will be able to chart new territories only if you are willing to take the risk. As long as you can make the business sustainable. That was my professional zen moment.
Bengaluru’s burgeoning expat community found Olive and fell in love with it immediately, saying this was exactly what they were missing. Ironic, right? I’m running a western restaurant which all the goras love, but the Indians don’t think it is a western restaurant because, in their limited experience a western restaurant is whatever they were used to till then. But within the first three or four years we migrated from being a 70-80 per cent expat restaurant to a 70-80 per cent Indian restaurant.
The economy of course started to open up. And people travelled more, people experienced more. Shows like Masterchef started hitting the airwaves. People became a lot more familiar with what high-end cuisine could look like. And here was a place that was sitting right under your nose all this while delivering just that. It was slow but steady. Olive is nearly 20 years old now and still doing well.
That’s testament to the fact that you can build a great brand with a combination of smart product placement and good business acumen. Obviously there was a cultural personality involved. A.D. Singh (Olive’s founder) himself was a well-known personality and I become a bit of a celebrity chef. So all these things went hand in hand. And that is around the time I said we need to start doing something that is a little more democratic.
Q/ Then you changed track with a gastropub.
A/ I felt we were siloed in the fine dining space. And there is this large young population that wants to go out and have a good time. We want something that is a little more democratic in the sense that it is not necessarily pandering only to a fine dining experience. And that is really where the genesis of the idea of opening a gastropub came about. My partner Chetan and I formed a new company, parked our lifesavings into it (along with A.D. Singh) to open a gastropub with a very Indian DNA. That’s how Monkey Bar came about.
We were petrified because the first three or four days nobody walked in. But after the fourth day, as they say, it was history. We just couldn’t cope with the deluge of humans who wanted to come in there and enjoy the product and ambience and the culture that we created.
It was a watershed moment for Indian hospitality. We brought the word gastropub into the lexicon. We took regional Indian food and made it fun and approachable. You would get a class act vada pav. You would still get the most gourmet burger. You could enjoy a pandi curry from Coorg or a gassi from Mangaluru. You could have, you know, okonomiyaki (Japanese pancake) for breakfast. It was just such a kichdi of things. But it just came together naturally.
The service was always on point, never subservient. That was also a first. We trained the service staff to present their own personality on the floor. Be the customers’ friend, not their servant.
Q/ What’s the growth potential now beyond the big cities?
A/ I think demand and aspiration exist everywhere in this country. It is only a matter of infrastructure, real estate and supply chain catching up. Most of the expansion of the big restaurateurs that you see in the country right now is clearly directed towards the tier 2 and tier 3 cities. More tier 2, with tier 3 catching up. Many are opting for the franchisee model because that makes sense to them―they get a fee and it is fuelling their valuation. Tier 2 and tier 3 are very exciting―I don’t think there is one single Indian brand which has done what a KFC or McDonald’s has done, not even a Saravana Bhavan. It comes from the fact that no one developed that kind of aspiration so far. It will be interesting to see who does it first.