Just about four days ago came the news that Qualia was listed in the 50 Best Discovery List of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants for 2021.
In 2019, 50 Best, the brand behind The World’s 50 Best Restaurants and The World’s 50 Best Bars annual ranking and awards, had launched 50 Best Discovery.
It was a huge achievement for a chef and his team in troubled times like these. It must have been a bitter-sweet moment for Chef Akerkar, who, by then, had decided to shut his much-celebrated restaurant, Qualia, which was set on the outer fringes of swish Lodha World One Towers in central Mumbai.
Sometime late this afternoon, Chef Akerkar put out a statement stating he was shutting down Qualia. In effect, August 31 was its last day of operation. “We’ve tried to keep things going but can no longer sustain it. The recent all-clear to finally start a very restricted dine-in service has seen things turn around dramatically, but sadly it’s too little too late,” he said.
In pretty much every interview over the past year, Chef Akerkar has spoken about the difficult circumstances. “And yet we were convinced that keeping going during the first lockdown would only benefit us once things returned to some semblance of normalcy in a vaccinated world as people pushed on through into the ‘post-COVID era.’ Those eateries that were able to survive the carnage that befell the restaurant industry, would surely kill it once things recovered. They had to. It was obvious, wasn’t it? People had been stuck at home devoid of dining and socializing outdoors and were desperate to break their cabin fever. We just had to hold on. The question was, “for how long?” No one knew. We couldn’t even fathom a guess, and yet everything depended on being able to time this to a T.”
According to Akerkar, the investors did keep putting in money, and the skeletal restaurant staff did whatever needed to keep it going: they restructured the rent with the landlords, as did many restaurants, took salary cuts, multitasked, delivered “comfort-food, hearty offering to appeal to a wider audience and control food costs”, created family meals, and DIY food kits with menus and cuisines that changed every week, hosted online cooking videos and digital cooking classes.
In a conversation last year, he had spoken about why deliveries were just short-term goals for any restauranteur. “Deliveries will never keep you afloat. They won’t even meet your running costs. Besides, the aggregator and food delivery platforms commissions and their refusal to share guest data, which is very crucial if you want to run deliveries, eat into all the margins.”
Chef Akerkar had been working on setting up his tech platform and delivery mechanism, where he used his team to deliver. When the first lockdown ended in 2020, he followed the footsteps of European restaurants by creating Qualia’s curbside dining through the winter months while the weather permitted. “Our diners loved this and came out in droves. We were packed and business grew exponentially. We’d done it. We’d held on, and cashflows began recovering as we thought they would. Hope.”
However, as he now says, “It just wasn’t enough to break even. You cannot make a dine-in restaurant format viable by only doing deliveries. Something had to give.”
And something did give.
The second Mumbai lockdown pretty much “knocked the wind right out of our sails. Business came to a virtual standstill and our cashflows all but dried up. Our investors, hit in their businesses, lost their appetite to keep putting money in to fund our operations. Debt and liabilities mounted. We tried again to renegotiate and restructure our rent. We couldn’t even afford to pay our employees anymore, and morale dropped to an all-time low. Despite this the team plodded on, working tirelessly on the hope we’d find the funds and they’d get paid eventually. We hoped for a miracle, but none came.”
For Mumbai’s, nay India’s restaurant scene, the closing down of Qualia is not just a loss but also symptomatic of the carnage that has been unleashed on the industry that has received very little state support and continues to struggle with debts, losses and restrictions. Over 25 percent of restaurants in India are unlikely to open again, says restaurateur AD Singh, who himself shut down a few of his restaurants, as did Riyaaz Amlani’s Impresario.
For Akerkar, this is the end of his Qualia dream, for now. In 2015, the biochemist-turned-restaurateur had parted way with his partners at Indigo, and in 2019 he came back with Qualia at The World Towers in Lower Parel. The 4,000-square feet space served contemporary no-fuss food. The great culinary discovery for Akerkar in the process of establishing Qualia was the “art and pleasures” of pickling, which found its way into the menu with contrasting sour and sweet notes in many of the dishes.
It is the end of the road for Qualia, but not for Chef Akerkar who promises to come back with a far more exciting restaurant format.
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