Kalra continues to experiment

Now that he has been a judge on the Indian Masterchef and has danced on Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa, Zorawar Kalra is one of India’s better known food figures.

The television fame distracts from what is probably his greatest achievement as a restaurateur:

 

   What’s more, he did it by himself. He is not from a business family. He had no real capital to begin with. And when he started out, he had never worked in a kitchen, let alone a restaurant. He had zero experience but 100 per cent confidence.

 

   The only advantage Kalra had was that his father was Jiggs Kalra, the former journalist who had a huge influence on the Indian food scene. Jiggs was one of the first people (along with the late Busybee) to write about food, first in Mumbai for the Times group and then in Delhi for the HT group.

 

   Jiggs made two great contributions to Indian food. He toured the country and discovered people like Lucknow’s Tunday Kababawala who had remained a local phenomenon till then. Many now famous cooks and chefs owe their national fame almost entirely to Jiggs’s championship of their food.

 

   Secondly, he took real Indian food to hotels which had been content with serving catering college-influenced antiseptic approximations of the food. Because Jiggs was well-connected from his journalistic days, he could deal with the top managers of Indian hotels. Rajiv Kaul, then at the Oberoi, was his original mentor. Later Jiggs became friends with Ajit Kerkar of the Taj. And eventually, his relationship with Habib Rehman contributed to the launch of ITC’s Dum Pukht and to Chef Imitaz Qureshi's rise to fame.

 

   But Jiggs was a complicated guy. He fell out with many of the chefs he had once been friends with (Arvind Saraswat, Imitaz himself etc.) and never recognised the true value of his own contributions. He gave ideas away for free; rarely made much money and when his health began to fail him (when he was in his late 40s), he found few people in the hotel and food business who were willing to stand by him and grew increasingly disillusioned and despondent.

 

   Zorawar’s love of food came from his father though Jiggs sent him to Boston to do an MBA and urged him to find a non-food career in the US. But Zorawar came back to look after his father, who by then was in very poor health and had very little by way of income.

 

   Determined to rescue the family fortunes, Zorawar started Punjab Grill as a QSR type operation at food courts and met with some small time success till he was discovered by Amit Burman and Rohit Agarwal of Lite Bite Foods who bought a majority stake in his company and turned Punjab Grill into a flourishing restaurant chain.

 

   After a few years of working with Lite Bite, Zorawar decided he wanted to do something of his own.  Burman and Agarwal bought his stake for a substantial sum and Zorawar took the money and launched Made in Punjab, a sort of Son of Punjab Grill.

 

"He now has around 25 Farzis and a dozen Pa Pa Yas all around the world: in London, in Seattle, in Dubai and the rest of the Middle East and of course in India."

   But he kept the bulk of the money for his dream project. This was inspired by a visit to the first great molecular cuisine restaurant, Spain’s El Bulli, on his honeymoon where he had been startled by the culinary techniques and wanted to apply them to Indian food. At that stage only Indian Accent was doing modern Indian food (non-molecular, though) so he stole away Himanshu Saini and Saurabh Udinia, two of the best young chefs in the Indian Accent kitchen and launched Masala Library in Mumbai’s then new Bandra-Kurla complex.  He says he had never heard of Gaggan when he launched his restaurant but clearly his chefs had, because some of Gaggan’s dishes did turn up on the menu.

 

   Masala Library was an instant success (it just celebrated its tenth anniversary) and Zorawar received funding from Singapore’s Everstone group for his next big venture. He believed that restaurants like Masala Library and Indian Accent (and I guess Gaggan, if he had heard of it) had transformed Indian food. It was not the Frenchified Indian food of the upmarket London restaurants but something original, creative and Indian-born.

 

   But all of those restaurants were expensive and hard to get into. Suppose he took the elements that made this kind of Indian food successful and served it at lower prices in more casual surroundings?

 

   He worked on a fun (but still innovative) menu with Saini and Udinia and came up with the idea of Farzi Café.

 

   The first Farzi opened in Delhi’s Cyber Hub and almost from the day it began, it was packed out with young people. Kalra had found the sweet spot: young people from the new middle class, whose palates were used to Indian flavours but who could not bear to go to the old places their parents went to. Farzi offered them super-cool sophisticated Indian food.

 

   To have one good idea could have been luck. But Kalra then had another brainwave. The young people who came to Farzi had tired of Chicken Manchurian-type Chinese places. They were now ready for sushi rolls and other South East Asian dishes. But the existing restaurants that served this cuisine were intimidating, expensive and relatively few in number.

 

   His new venture, Pa Pa Ya Farzified sushi and other kinds of Asian food. Because his customers were often unfamiliar with the cuisine, he put little notes on the table explaining how to eat sushi (do not use chopsticks; you can use your hands etc.) This was an instant success too.

 

   With two hit concepts in his quiver, Kalra went looking for locations and franchisees and found them. He now has around 25 Farzis and a dozen Pa Pa Yas all around the world: in London, in Seattle, in Dubai and the rest of the Middle East and of course in India. A second expansion into what used to be called B class centres (Kanpur, Nagpur etc.) continues and in those cities his Farzi Café is often the hottest and trendiest restaurant in town.

 

   Kalra continues to experiment with other brands and to expand. There is now a Thai-brand, a European seafood restaurant will open in Mumbai soon, and there are successful bar concepts all over the country. The Delhi Masala Library, a roaring success that had to shut because of the landlord’s problems with the municipality should reopen soon and Kalra is looking at more opportunities abroad.

 

   His sights are firmly set on the US where the performance of his first Farzi has convinced him that the market is huge. His vision is to open 50 restaurants in North America on the grounds that, unlike London where there is a lot of casual India dining (Masala Zone, Dishoom, Hoppers etc.) that space is wide open in the US and Canada.

 

   Success has not changed Kalra. I remember him at the start of his career when his father called and said that his son was going into restaurants. He was much as he is now, high energy, fast-talking, super-optimistic and convinced that his next project will be the best and biggest yet.

 

   But, given the frenetic pace of his experience, he has had to learn how to manage stress levels. He insists on getting a good night’s sleep, does not drink alcohol after eight pm and is a little obsessive about his health, rigging himself to sugar monitors and blood pressure readers all the time.

 

   With that much success and the stress that goes with it, I guess it is good to be careful. Deep down he must remember how his father’s health failed. But he must also know that he has achieved far more than Jiggs — who remained sadly unrewarded in his lifetime — could ever have dreamt of. Finally the Kalra family has financial success commensurate with its contribution to Indian food.