The hunger and curiosity that Nirula’s built

Nirula's, Connaught Place, in 1989 (Image via Twitter/@IndiaHistoryPic)

The Capital owes some of its enduring love for pizzas to Deepak Nirula. Back in 1977, Nirula – the former owner of the popular Delhi restaurant chain Nirula’s who passed away earlier this week at the age of 70 – introduced the pizza, a completely alien but steeped-in-history dish at his new restaurant Nirula’s Hot Shoppe. “Pizza crust … is very similar to the flat Indian bread that we call nan,” he told a New York Times correspondent visiting in 1978, by when it had become clear that Delhiites had an appetite for pizza. “And people everywhere like tomatoes.”

Opened in Connaught Place – home to Nirula’s hotels and restaurants since the 1920s – Nirula’s Hot Shoppe had shiny yellow vinyl counters, rock music blasting out of its speakers, and a very American menu featuring hamburgers, cheeseburgers, pizzas and hot dogs. This was food that Delhi (maybe India) hadn’t yet tasted, but was beginning to get familiar with: Primarily as the fare served at Pop’s Chock’lit Shop in Archies comics, in 1990s Hollywood movies, and sitcoms like F.R.I.E.N.D.S. (that also birthed a generation of coffee enthusiasts).

(Watercolour on paper; credit and courtesy AdirajArts via Twitter CP_Heartofdelhi)

Nirula’s was Delhi’s first tryst with American fast food – a revolutionary concept that blended the accessibility of diners and all-day-open policy of cafes, with a mass production, speed and low, low prices to produce an unholy but irresistible monster. Except, Nirula’s did it minus the assembly line production and dipped-in-trans fat frozen patties.

Hot Shoppe was an instant success, as were Nirula’s successive formats, particularly the ice-cream parlour and the upper-scale PotPourri with its salad bar. This was years before the big American food MNCs invaded Indian cities post-1991. Nirula’s did novelty right, and for a couple of decades there, Deepak Nirula had an entire city eating out of his hands.

It wasn’t like we weren’t familiar with the larger idea of fast food. Maybe the exquisite gol gappe at a popular stall outside the UPSC building in Lutyens Delhi qualify. Or that certain hole-in-the-wall shop in north Delhi’s Kamla Nagar that sells piping hot chhole kulche.
In Chandni Chowk, Karim’s would be parcelling cooked-in-the-AM fragrant biryani and pots of piquant nihari to go. If you needed a quick bite, the deep-fried stuffed parathe of Parathewali Gali and cool dahi bhalle from Nataraj on the road opposite would more than suffice. The kebab and tikka rolls at Khan Chacha’s or the samosas of Gole Market: Speed, taste, affordability was of essence at any of these word-of-mouth-famous spaces.

Food historians say the 1980s and ’90s brought an unprecedented expansion of the Indian consumer’s palate. ‘Eating out’ began to mean something beyond what was popularly called Mughlai, Tandoori, Punjabi, Chindian or ‘Continental’ – that last an odd hypernym for everything that could be remotely identified as European. What it often meant was Paneer Sizzlers, an Indian invention inspired by the Japanese teppanyaki; or Chicken a la Kiev, a sinful thing with too much butter, cream and cheese which may actually have had nothing to do with Ukraine.

A lot of this had to do with the boom in the QSR or ‘quick service restaurant’ business. In 1981, the late P. Rajagopal had set up Saravana Bhavan in Chennai, bringing the McDonald’s ethos to ‘tiffin’ aka dosa-idli-vada. Wimpy’s, the American burger joint, arrived in Delhi in 1985, and was for a moment thought of as hip for its red and white decor and American-tasting burgers. Most of all, it did fries right.

By 1996, McDonald’s golden arches had been erected in Delhi’s Basant Lok, triggering a nationwide infatuation that continues to this day. Domino’s, Pizza Hut, KFC, Burger King, Dunkin Donuts, Krispy Kreme, Taco Bell – the entire cavalry followed, right at home as malls and multiplexes became ubiquitous. At least in the case of pizza from these shops, we learned to settle for less with time.

In the 1990s, the pizza at Nirula’s wasn’t all that either. It didn’t come with a thin- or thick- crust, as it does now, apparently. That pizza couldn’t have been the subject of a Chef’s Table episode, but it didn’t skimp on the essentials. And it was imaginative enough.

Deepak Nirula had studied restaurant administration at Cornell University and returned to India to take over the reins of a thriving 50-year-old business – which had, in the past, run iconic restaurants like La Boheme and the Chinese Room – along with his brother Lalit.

Having lived and experienced the American pizza boom, not only did he seem to understand the universal appeal of a good crust, tomato sauce and cheese; he also seemed to know that replacing pepperoni or bacon with a little chicken tikka, capsicum and onion, would give him a sure winner. It worked and Nirula’s became the gateway for us to experience food from a whole other part of the world.

It was certainly a time of discovery for the epicure; and for the truly curious, a new generation of chefs and restaurateurs across India’s metropolises were straying far away from the opulent, stuffy fine-dine restaurants of five-star hotels - with varying results.

More ‘authentic’ pizza might’ve been found at celebrity chef Ritu Dalmia’s first short-lived Italian restaurant, MezzaLuna in Hauz Khas Village (HKV). HKV was still virgin territory in 1993. “Next door was a Thai place run by Radhika Singh, and Andy Verma ran Duke’s Place. All of it was very hip and cool and way before its time,” Dalmia told Mint in 2017.

In Mumbai, where Cream Centre ruled hearts and minds, noted restaurateur A.D. Singh (of Olive fame) and legendary chef Rahul Akerkar’s (Indigo, Qualia) Irani-cafe-by-day-jazz-cafe-by-night Just Desserts opened at Churchgate in 1990 (the same year that Shivsagar launched, perfecting a wholly different template of vegetarian Indian fast food).

In Bangalore, India’s first cafe chain Cafe Coffee Day took off in 1996. By 2002, NRAI chief and Impresario boss Riyaaz Amlani’s “indigenous cafe” Mocha, with paninis and hookahs on the menu, had established itself in Mumbai and was making inroads in the national capital region.

Casual dining and cafe culture would become a thing by the mid-2000s. Eventually, hybridisation and experimentation, in form and content, became increasingly common, often with delightful, highly lucrative results (See: SOCIAL).

Today, there are consumers and creators for every global culinary trend here, be it slow food or the locavore movement. Coming full circle, the thrust is now on producing, sourcing, foraging, creating and consuming local, seasonal food, in a way that’s least harmful to the planet. Imported is out; regional is in; homegrown is hot.

Nirula’s was a product of its time; it’s unlikely that it could have had that kind of success today, even in its original form. In the 1980s, a heavily shielded Indian population was ready to look west and Deepak Nirula had the first-mover advantage. At its peak, Nirula’s had expanded into every corner of Delhi, serving their greatest hits – the Big Boy Burger, the banana split, the kathi rolls, the softies, the ice-cream sodas, the Jamoca almond ice cream – to adoring, loyal customers. It had become part of the DNA of the city.

Some of Nirula’s resonance – the fact that it is the subject of such a vast and continuous outpouring of nostalgia on social media – likely has something to do with Deepak Nirula’s attention to detail. As the 1978 NYT piece observed, Deepak Nirula sketched his hamburgers to show his chefs and crew how to prepare them. His office walls were lined with photographs of American fast food joints that he’d taken while in the US.

Nirula’s offered free food to students who scored well in their exams: A genius marketing move, one that even McDonald’s tried to ape. At Pot Pourri, the salad bar was always fresh, the burgers came open faced. Outside, there was a water cooler, for tourists, pedestrians and shoppers coping with treacherous Delhi summers.

And then there was the Hot Chocolate Fudge: Steaming hot fudge sauce melting scoops of vanilla ice cream in a beer mug, freshly roasted nuts crumbled on top: It was decadent, it was simple and it didn’t change. That is, until everything did when the Nirulas sold off their stake in 2006.

Danny Meyer, the man behind Shake Shack and some of New York’s most popular restaurants, once said: “Every restaurant needs to have a point of view”. He also said that good food is the kind that makes you feel. Deepak Nirula’s POV may have been nothing more than sharp business acumen, and knowing that novelty, ubiquity and accessibility would make his enterprise click.

But that’s not why it’s going to live a long life in India’s cultural memory. That will likely be because Nirula’s made its customers feel; feel as if they were at home and elsewhere at once. Who wouldn’t want another scoop of that?