The Oberoi's Old Sushi Master Augusto Cabrera Back in the City as Town Hall's Managing Partner

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

Augusto Cabrera, seen above in his days at The
Oberoi New Delhi, is back in the city as Executive
Chef and Managing Partner of the 160-seater
Town Hall  restaurant in Khan Market.

WHEN The Oberoi New Delhi's Master Sushi Chef Augusto Cabrera left the hotel where he had the national capital's elite eating out of his hands at threesixty°, he said he was returning to his home city in the Philippines to open a restaurant that would be owned by his family. But lo and behold, he's back in the city as Executive Chef and Managing Partner of the new restaurant that has got everyone talking -- Town Hall at Khan Market. And he has hired his former second-in-command, who had reportedly moved on to Wasabi by Morimoto at the Taj Mahal Hotel, as the replacement for Vikramjit Roy.

For The Oberoi, it means competition that is too close for comfort, but having sampled the sushi rolls at threesixty° a couple of Sundays back, I couldn't discern any drop in quality. It was as if Augusto hadn't left. That is the strength of The Oberoi. It seems impervious to personnel changes. And I believe, a replacement for Augusto, who had joined The Oberoi from Dubai's Towers Rotana in 2004, will soon be seen in action at threesixty°. Then, it promises to be a battle of the sushi masters!

Enough of speculation. Now, let's return to the facts. Town Hall is a 160-seater international fine-dining restaurant with noticeably high ceilings, a sushi station and a terrace dining space with a wood-fired pizza oven. In scale, Town Hall is the most ambitious restaurant project after Set'Z, which is at DLF Emporio, and it is being promoted by Navneet Kalra of Dayal Opticals, who seems to own just about every square inch of Khan, including the ever-popular Khan Chacha, and the space now occupied by Harry's Bar and Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. Partnering with him is Randeep Bajaj, the 28-year-old owner of Amour restaurants, who has extended his wings from Hauz Khas Village and Malcha Marg Market.

Augusto joins them in his new role as chef-turned-entrepreneur (he describes the restaurant as the place where "East meets West"), bringing with him his wealth of professional experience and deep understanding of the Delhi market. It was he, after all, who rid Delhi's chattering classes of their fear of raw fish by introducing the culture of sushi rolls. The minuscule Japanese market, back then in 2004, was dominated by the classical approaches of Sakura and Tamura, the two haunts of the city's Japanese expat population.
I remember how Master Chef Nariyoshi Nakamura, who was then at Sakura (and is now being wasted at the Sheraton New Delhi, Saket), would sniff at the idea of sushi rolls. Sushi, in his dictionary, meant nigiri, nori seaweed-wrapped maki, temaki and the gunboat, gunkan maki. Augusto and threesixty° changed all that. Will he and his mates be able to breathe life into Khan Market, which looks like a ghost town after 8 p.m.? The city will soon be looking towards Town Hall for the answer.

McDonald's Taps Out-of-Home Breakfast Market As It Becomes Footfall Driver for Standalone Restaurants

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

FOR THE second year in succession, McDonald's celebrated National Breakfast Day, which is its own invention, on Monday, March 24, by handing out thousands of McMuffins gratis to early-bird customers at designated outlets. The five in Delhi-NCR even test-marketed the idea of an all-day breakfast served from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., taking a leaf out of similar packages now offered by five-star hotels to the cater to the requirements of the many body clocks of world-travelling international patrons.

Out-of-home breakfast may seem to be an idea that is alien to India (why would anyone want to have breakfast at a McDonald's when you can dig aloo parantha or dosai at home?), but as the demographics of our cities change, the trend seems to be catching on.

A McDonald's Breakfast Favourite:
Sausage Egg McMufffin. The QSR
chain can draw solace from the
success of the breakfast offerings
of standalone restaurants

Actually, it is not as foreign to our culture as it may seem at first glance. The breakfast offerings of Saravana Bhavan, Murugan's Idli and MTR are established favourites; the crispy stuffed paranthas of Murthal dhabas continue to attract Delhiites by the carload at breakfast time; the popularity of jalebi-and-hot creamy milk treats at places as varied as Jodhpur, Lucknow and Varanasi shows no signs of diminishing; and Purani Dilli's bedmi-aloo is worth a trip to Chandni Chowk, especially on a Sunday.

McDonald's is simply tapping into this market, and if the following at home of its Egg and Chicken Sausage McMuffin and pancakes bathed in molten butter and maple syrup is any indication (though my personal favourite is the McEgg Burger, which I recommend strongly to all!), then it must be succeeding. Restaurateurs offering breakfast share the fast-food chain's confidence in this segment of the organised restaurant market, or what its spokesman, Rajesh Maini, calls the "massification of breakfast".

The All American Diner at Habitat World took the lead about 15 years ago by introducing a breakfast offering. Today, according to Old World Hospitality's F&B Director Rakesh Anand, as many as 175-200 people daily have the Diner's breakfast between 7 and 11 a.m., and the number goes up to 250-300 a day for the weekend breakfast (in the summer months) or brunch (in the winter) buffet laid out on the lawns.

Most of the people opting for the weekday breakfast option are Lodi Garden walkers; Habitat World has 58 guest rooms, but not more than 15-20 of the guests come down for breakfast, for most of them prefer to have it served in the comfort of their room. The rest of the breakfast guests are residents of Golf Links next door, students unwinding after all-nighters and professionals working in offices in the neighbourhood. Anand, in fact, claims that it was the Diner that popularised the idea of breakfast meetings.

Families and specialised groups, such as those devoted to cycling or to burning Harley Davidson rubber, dominate the weekend turnout. The only flip side of the business, Anand points out, is that "breakfast is the most difficult service in terms of human behaviour". Apparently, if you are doing breakfast shift, you get to know all about people getting up from the wrong side of the bed. "That explains why for breakfast shift we only have cheerful, non-intrusive staff who are sensitive to guest feelings," adds Anand.

At Smoke House Deli, Khan Market, whose breakfast menu matches that of the All American Diner in both variety and quality, the morning turnout can be split into two time bands: 25-30, mostly expats on their way to work, between 8:15 and 9-9:30, and another 20-25, mostly desi, opt for a "lazy breakfast" between 9:30 and 11.

Sharing this information, Sid Mathur, F&B Director of Impresario Hospitality & Entertainment, the company that owns Smoke House Deli, said the out-of-home breakfast market has been growing for three reasons: "A lot of people, especially young professionals living away from their families, don't have full-time help at home; people's tastes have changed -- they're moving away from paranthas; and young double-income couples are increasingly finding it more convenient to eat out."

Well, paranthas are no longer hot in this market segment. At Smoke House Deli, Eggs Benedict is the reigning favourite. McDonald's, then, has a good reason to be confident about the future of the Egg and Sausage McMuffin.

Lal Maas and Gourmet Goa: My Op-Ed Column & Restaurant Review in Mail Today

My two recent articles for Mail Today, India Today Group's daily newspaper published from Delhi-NCR. First, my Op-Ed column, Fortune Cookie, which appears on alternate Thursdays.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article-2417934/FORTUNE-COOKIE-The-secrets-real-Lal-Maas.html

This is my weekly 'Dining Out' review. My review was about the Gourmet Goa food promotion that is being presented by the restaurant Bernardo's at The Kitchen in Khan Market, New Delhi.
http://epaper.mailtoday.in/showtext.aspx?boxid=533931&parentid=85151&issuedate=1392013

Varun Tuli Loses Khan Market But Gets VVIP Wedding

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

THE passionate young restaupreneur who has acquired a legion of admirers with the sushi and dim sum served at Yum Yum Tree, New Friends Colony, Varun Tuli was to open his second restaurant in the Middle Lane of Khan Market in the space occupied by Sudha Kuckreja and Manav Sharma’s Blanco. I, for one, was really looking forward to the second restaurant, for I have become a fan of Tuli’s and the present location of Yum Yum Tree doesn’t agree with me.

Tuli, we are told, has withdrawn from the project, albeit not voluntarily. He got the restaurant project rolling on a war footing and his architect and interior decorators got down to work, and so did the Japanese conveyor belt company. It was at this advanced stage that the landlord, Navneet Kalra of Dayal Opticals, who is Khan Market’s biggest real estate owner, pulled the plug. He refused to give Tuli the possession letter, after procrastinating, and then simply informed the young man that he was going to run his own restaurant in that space.

Kalra, if you remember, had bought over Khan Chacha, the popular hole-in-the-wall kebab roll seller, a couple of years back. The place has seen a dip in popularity, maybe because people are getting tired of the same old rolls, but it seems to have given Kalra enough good reasons to turn into a full-time restaurateur.

Yum Yum Tree's Varun Tuli (centre) with friends

For Tuli, sadly, finding a second home for Yum Yum Tree is turning out to be quite an arduous endeavour. He was seriously looking at No. 28, Lodi Colony Market, the address where AD Singh’s Guppy by Ai is located, after Sorab Sitaram walked out of the European restaurant project he was working on with the landlords. Tuli dumped it in favour of Khan Market, but he has been two times unlucky.

Nonetheless, Tuli’s catering business is keeping him very busy and the Delhi leg of the wedding of Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi’s son, Gaurav, who’s tying the knot with his British girlfriend Elizabeth Colebourn in October, will see the young restaurateur putting together a spread for 1,200 to 1,500 people for what promises to be the who’s who event of the year. (Incidentally, Colebourn, who studied at London School of Economics and now lives in Delhi, met Gaurav Gogoi in New York in 2010 while interning with the sanctions committee of the United Nations Secretariat.) The catering contract will establish Tuli’s position as the rising star of the catering world.

(Here's a link to an article I wrote for Mail Today/India Today Group on Navneet Kalra and Khan Chacha. http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/The+reinvention+of+Khan+Chacha+/1/84778.html)

Did Delhi HC’s Khan Market Ruling Cost Vikram Bakshi His Job? Bakshi Denies Link & Says ‘MD Issue’ is in the ‘Legal Domain’

(This is an updated post that incorporates Vikram Bakshi’s response. Fairness demands that he has his say. We’ll keep you posted on the developments in this story.)

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

A TERSE public notice issued by McDonald’s India indicates that times are a-changing in the fast food chain that has grown remarkably — its 250-plus outlets now serve over 6.5 lakh customers a day — since it entered India in 1996.

The notice, which appears on Page 14 of The Economic Times, New Delhi, on Friday, August 29, informs the general public that “Mr Vikram Bakshi has ceased to be the Managing Director of Connaught Plaza Restaurants Private Limited (CPRL), having its registered office at 13, Tolstoy Marg, New Delhi-110001, and its corporate office at 13-A, Jor Bagh Market, New Delhi-110003, pursuant to the expiration of Mr Bakshi’s term as Managing Director on 17th July 2013”. It goes on to say, “The general public is hereby informed and put to notice that CPRL is now being managed by its Board of Directors.”

Responding to this post, Bakshi in a text message to Indian Restaurant Spy said, “This matter of the managing director is in the legal domain now and therefore I am not in a position to say anything at this stage. However, I continue being a Director and JV Partner with control of 50 per cent equity in the JV Company. I shall respond to all queries in due course.”

CPRL is a joint venture company that McDonald’s India set up with Bakshi, an affable self-made entrepreneur who is also a real estate developer, to run the chain’s outlets in the north and the east. Amit Jatia’s Hardcastle Restaurants Private Limited (HRPL) was the joint venture partner for the west and the south till it got upgraded to “development licencee” status in 2010, which, according to a McDonald’s  India media release issued then ” (http://www.mcdonaldsindia.com/aboutus.html), is given only to a partner whose “financial strength, viability, profitability and long-term sustainability of the business is assured”. CRPL is yet to get that status.

Has Bakshi paid the price for what is described in the trade as the Khan Market snafu, which apparently didn’t go down well with the chain’s top brass? McDonald’s India only got bad press (and an adverse Delhi High Court ruling) when it was evicted last month from the three-floor premises it was occupying in Khan Market. The premises belonged to an octogenarian widow, Niamat Kaur, who asked McDonald’s to either vacate the property as the nine-year lease had expired in 2010, or renew the lease after paying the prevailing market rent.

In the case heard by the Delhi High Court, which saw retired Chief Justice A.P. Shah acting as arbitrator and top lawyer, Harish Salve, appearing on behalf of the petitioner, McDonald’s was not only evicted by Justice Manmohan Singh, but also asked to pay the market rent at the rate of Rs 11 lakh per month from February 11, 2010, the date of expiry of the lease deed.

Justice Singh came down heavily on McDonald’s India and Bakshi when he observed: “Vikram Bakshi, managing director of the petitioner company, is aware about the actual rent in Khan Market. Even he lives in Jor Bagh. He is running 117 restaurants in prime areas of India. He has real estate business also ... it is not believable that the petitioner is not aware about the market rent of Khan Market area.”

Bakshi, however, denied any link between the ruling and his position in the company. “The Khan Market ruling has nothing whatsoever to do with the re-election of the managing director,” he said. “We had a proper extension letter from our landlady. But as we have said before, we shall abide by the decision of the Delhi High Court, where an appeal is pending.”

Ironically, just in June, opening the largest McDonald’s India outlet at the Great India Place, Noida, Bakshi had said CPRL plans to invest up to Rs 500 crore to double the total number of the fast-food chain’s outlets in the north and the east to 300 by 2015. This year, he said, the company will add 45 outlets to its present spread of 152 stores.

American corporations are particularly sensitive to adverse court rulings and in this case McDonald’s India and CRPL came across as being insensitive to an elderly woman. Was Khan Market, despite his categorical denial, the real reason for the unseating of Vikram Bakshi?