Just a couple of weeks into the national lockdown in March 2020, IHCL, the holding company of luxury hotel brands such as Taj, figured that if it had any hope of doing business in the coming months, it would have to find a way to home deliver food from its many award-winning restaurants. Hotel stays were down to zero and were likely going to stay that way, so restaurants were the key source of income now.
Fine-dining restaurants, especially the kinds that are part of luxury hotel chains, place as much importance on the venue, ambience, service, presentation, etc., as on the food itself. It also isn’t unusual for a fine-dining restaurants to refuse requests to pack leftovers to preserve the sanctity of the dish. So, the very idea of running a fine-dining business on the same model as a roadside delivery restaurant was unthinkable. Then again, so was the idea of the entire world grinding to a halt.
Taj would go on to launch Qmin, an app that would home-deliver food from its restaurants. Other hotel chains such as ITC and Marriot also launched their food-delivery services, albeit through phone calls and WhatsApp messages. For anyone remotely connected to the food and beverage (F&B) industry, it was evident that to survive, they’d have to home deliver their food, fine dining or not.
For Gauri Devidayal, director of Food Matters, the company that runs a handful of restaurants including The Table, a fine-dining restaurant, and Mag St Kitchen, a cool experimental space, an unlikely opportunity presented itself.
Mag St Bread Co started out as a bakery supplying breads and other basic baked goods to some of the best-known cafes and restaurants in Mumbai. With the 2020 lockdown causing restaurants to shut down, Mag St Bread Co’s business was affected, too, at first. “But as soon as delivery of essential items was allowed, the demand for breads and baked goods increased,” Devidayal recollects. And just like that, a brand that was essentially B2B (business to business), began retailing to individual customers. “For a while, Mag St Bread Co was our only fully-functional brand,” she says.
The unexpected success of Mag St Bread Co made Devidayal realise that she’d have to make the menus of some of her other restaurants delivery-friendly, too. This was easier to do for some restaurants; for others, it took a little creative thinking.
Devidayal relaunched Miss T, an Asian restaurant that boasted of a cool mixology programme but had shut long before the pandemic, as a delivery kitchen. The drinks went out but gyozas, sobas, pho bowls, and salads stayed. “But instead of just sending them as a regular delivery restaurant would, we packed the ingredients separately with assembly and/or heating instructions,” she says. This ensured that ingredients in dishes such as salads or pho, remained fresh, didn’t get soggy, and the diner could have their meal by assembling it at their convenience instead of gulping it down as soon as it arrived.
Devidayal followed the same model for her other restaurants including The Table, whose original menu was not designed for delivery. “We launched a separate delivery-only menu with dishes we knew could travel and relied on our customers to follow the DIY assembly instructions,” she says. Today, all of Devidayal’s restaurants home deliver, some even as far as Alibaug, a 50-minute ferry-ride across the Arabian Sea.
The moment the home delivery option was turned on, it freed up restaurateurs to think beyond their pre-existing menus. The field was wide open. For Devidayal it meant launching Mag St Pizza Co, a gourmet pizza brand that likely wouldn’t have opened if it weren’t for the pandemic.
Pizza was also the direction which restaurateur A.D. Singh took when it came to home delivery. Singh runs Olive Bar and Kitchen, with restaurants in most Indian metropolises. After experimenting with social distancing using mannequins in designer outfits and creating booths around tables, and offering chef-at-home services, Singh is launching Olive Pizzeria. The gourmet pizza kitchen will add to his roster of brands like Fatty Bao that already deliver nationally and by his own account “helped us reach some level of survival during the pandemic”.
With Olive Pizzeria, Singh’s aim is to not just create recipes that can travel better but also create packaging that survives the journey and stands out in his diners’ memory. Branding, he says, is key.
Also read: A.D. Singh: "About 30% of restaurants will shut down"
Also building menus for delivery and rethinking packaging is Radhika Dhariwal, co-founder of Passcode Hospitality that’s best known for launching PCO, a speakeasy in Delhi, in 2012.
Curating the right menu was easy for some of Passcode Hospitality's restaurants like Pings, an Asian street food restaurant that lends itself to delivery. For others, like SAZ, a brasserie specialising in elevated American cuisine, it was a little difficult. So, like Devidayal and Singh, she leaned in on traditional favourites that she knew would get picked up easily and would travel well. In the case of SAZ this included pastas, pizzas, soups, sandwiches, and burgers.
Besides curating the menus, Dhariwal and her team also spent time developing packaging: think eco-friendly boxes, cloth bags that could be reused. “Because in-home dining experience can’t just be about the food,” she says. “It has to be exciting in that it should bring as much of the restaurant and its philosophy as possible to the diner’s home.”
In this, Zorawar Kalra agrees with Singh and Dhariwal.
Kalra owns Massive Restaurants that runs over 32 restaurants across the country and a few overseas too. He says, “We’ve spent a lot of time and money in developing packaging for the meals we home deliver. Sushis go with gel packs, burgers go in boxes with magnets, etc. A lot of thought has gone into the look and quality of each packaging because it’s the best way to showcase your brand and give your customers a high-end experience at home.”
During this time, Kalra has also launched two delivery-only brands – Louis Burger and Butter Delivery. He’s been bullish on cloud kitchen for the higher return on investment (ROI) it tends to fetch compared with a brick-and-mortar restaurant.
“If there is a third wave (of Covid-19),” Kalra says, “it will be devastating to the restaurant industry. Cloud kitchens help make organisations leaner, control expenditure and so cloud is an important play for us.”
It isn’t surprising, therefore, that Kalra is looking to raise fresh capital to expand his cloud kitchen footprint to a dozen new cities by the end of March 2022.
Kalra has been heralding the end of fine-dining culture and the beginning of the gourmet comfort food trend. “The age of fine dining is coming to an end,” he told me somewhat dramatically in 2019 at the launch of Younion a hip bar that was clearly aimed at Gen Z and millennials. To be sure, he hasn’t launched a new fine-dining brand since, but a large part of his empire does comprise those restaurants. And like everyone else, he’s had to rethink his menu along the lines of what can travel and what can’t. While he doesn’t get into the details of how much tweaking he’s had to make to each of his menus, he says that sometimes it involves changing the cooking process of some dishes “like double frying something so it doesn’t get chewy by the time it reaches you”.
Also read: It's all gravy: Restaurateurs dial up focus on more premium cloud kitchens
Today, delivery contributes anywhere between 20% and 35% to the businesses of those with whom we spoke, a sharp rise from a meagre 5-10% at the beginning of 2020. But everyone agrees that it can likely never replace in-restaurant dining.
Kalra, somewhat dramatically, calls restaurant dining the last bastion of human interaction. But Sanjay Vazirani, who runs restaurants such as China Bistro, India Bistro, and Glocal Junction, says, “Convenience will be key, and the focus will have to be on building out hybrid models of restaurants.”
So, while like the others, Vazirani has also curated special delivery menus and put a lot of thought in packaging, he’s also repurposing a part of his restaurant kitchens to support newer delivery-only brands like Art of Dum.
“Experiential brands like Glocal Junction (a sprawling, all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant chain) will rely on in-restaurant diners, but we also have to acknowledge that a lot of people may not want to have comprehensive meals. So, we see an enormous potential in delivery too,” he says, adding that there’s no easy answer to what the future holds. “We’ll have to be agile and shift our SOPs (standard operating procedures) as per the needs and expectations of the times.”
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