Serving a plate of tales and customs
5 min read . Updated: 18 Feb 2020, 09:09 PM ISTEntrepreneurs across India are turning towards community-eating formats to make regional cuisines more popular, build a fan base and make money in the process
Eating together has been an integral part of our culture. Be it at weddings, in temples or even small gatherings, community and food have always been together.
Now, a growing number of people across India are using the idea of eating together to create a startup model and simultaneously make regional cuisines more popular.
“I have always believed that Bohri cuisine is a highly marketable cuisine. During a random brainstorming session in 2014, I decided to see if people would actually be interested in coming home, eat Bohri food cooked by my mother. It was supposed to be a fun side project, and it clicked," says Munaf Kapadia, 31, founder and chief eating officer of The Bohri Kitchen.
The Bohri Kitchen, set up in December 2014, was among the trendsettersin India of home-dining with strangers. It helped that the traditional Bohri thaal requires people to share a meal served on one huge plate. While his mother cooked, Kapadia looked over the business on weekends when people would gather at their south Mumbai house for a meal. Guests would book in advance, by paying around ₹1,500, and would share their meals while the family explained the origin of each dish.
Through word of mouth, The Bohri Kitchen became popular, even getting attention from Bollywood. Encouraged by the success, Kapadia quit his sales job at Google and opened a delivery kitchen. Since then, The Bohri Kitchen has gone through its share of highs and lows—from going bankrupt, to being featured in a magazine. In the process, it has also inspired others to follow a similar path.
Biodiversity calls
Delhi’s Sharmila Sinha liked cooking and feeding friends, sometimes even cooking for closed ones on request. With over 20 years of work experience in the environmental field, Sinha soon started thinking about food, biodiversity and the link between the provider and the final consumer. Encouraged by her daughter-in-law, Sinha launched Luchee in 2018, serving home-cooked Bengali food (with an Awadhi twist, as her Facebook page suggests) to guests.
“I have never looked at big groups, may be eight to 10 people, so that cooking was not a hassle and I enjoyed the process as well. The way I look at it, and ask my guests as well, is like a blind date. You never know who you are sharing the table with. That said, I end up learning so much from my guests as well—recipes or history of a particular ingredient, or how something is used in another culture," explains Sinha, 60, a writer by profession who also does documentation work for non-profits.
Bengaluru’s Anshumala Srivastava and Vaibhav Bahl came up with the idea of their food startup, Conosh, during a trip to Istanbul. As part of a community gathering, the two went for dinners in people’s homes, where they met other travellers and shared food and stories. They decided to create a similar design in India, and found a third partner, Neha Malik, for their startup.
“The idea was to eat together, host pop-ups and share stories with strangers. We wanted to see how it would work, so decided to first run a pilot in Goa, which sees a lot of travellers and where the shared economy is already sort of ready," says Bahl, 32.
Conosh was launched in April last year in Bengaluru, slowly building up to include Mumbai and Delhi. At present, Conosh has 70 home chefs and has hosted over 100 pop-ups. “These are not just housewives who are cooking and looking for an extra buck. These are young professionals and home chefs, from people who love to barbeque and share a beer, to folks who want to give people a taste of their local cuisine," explains Malik, 27. Conosh also has expats as hosts for pop-ups during Christmas and Thanksgiving.
While cultural exchange might be a great thing, the format has to be commercially viable for it to survive. According to Srivastava, 31, a big challenge was to break the “very-Indian" habit of making too much food. “We have grown up in houses where mothers would always cook extra food. But that means a lot of leftover food. After few such incidents, we had to sit with hosts and help them quantify and procure the materials needed."
The Bohri Kitchen too has had to learn about managing finances the hard way. In 2016, the brand suffered several losses and Kapadia was broke.
“When I launched the brand, I was brutally confident. But as the brand grew, I started running away from parts of it, production, accounting, operations, which I knew were not my strong points. I outsourced these responsibilities without even understanding them. In retrospect, I think it was too soon to ask for help. You cannot ask others to handle critical roles in a startup till you have at least got a firm foothold," Kapadia explains.
He turned the business around the next year by learning how to make the dishes his mother specialized in himself. This way, even if a chef was making a mistake at his delivery kitchens, Kapadia could correct it. The feedback, however, always came from the home-dining experience. He says they learnt what works and what does not from the guests at home. Currently, the commercial operations (delivery kitchens and catering) contribute to 95% of The Bohri Kitchen’s revenue. While the home-dining experience is a small part of it, Kapadia says it is what builds the brand. “People know us because of the home-dining experience. They come to share a meal and hear our stories, we build relationships there. It is what has made us known and loved and it is something we will always have."
