The story of The Table has often been told. Launched in 2011 by former tax consultant Gauri Devidayal and her businessman husband Jay Yousuf, the restaurant has since maintained a glittering presence in several ‘Best of Mumbai’ lists. It pioneered, and has stayed true to, the farm to table concept in the city and introduced it to small plates and the community table; its zucchini spaghetti and truffle scrambled eggs are justifiably famous.
But Devidayal, who now also runs, among others, the popular Mag St Cafe and delivery brands such as Iktara, wanted to share more unvarnished stories about being in the hospitality business; of navigating the tedious maze of bureaucracy in Mumbai; of getting excited about celebrity-sightings at her own restaurant; and of routinely dealing with turbulence, such as in 2017 when its star chef Alex Sanchez departed from The Table. The curious reader – and The Table fans – will find a lot of these stories in her self-published Diamonds for Breakfast, which she has co-authored with journalist and friend Vishwas Kulkarni.
The recently launched book is a crunchy read, leavened with anecdotes curated by Kulkarni, a longtime habitue of The Table, and is as much about the people behind it as it is about the people who frequent the restaurant. Here, Devidayal talks about the genesis of the book and the stuff they left out while writing it, the transformation of the restaurant scene in Mumbai, and of learning from failures.
– I actually aimed to get the book out for the tenth anniversary of The Table, but then other things happened, including Covid. The idea was not to write a hagiography of the restaurant, or about just me and Jay. We wanted a complete behind-the-scenes look at this business, of the ups and downs of running a restaurant. There is a lot of stuff we left out, of course. Like this guest who kept showing his fancy American Express card to my staff and said he could literally buy anything on Earth, including, for some reason, a helicopter. I’ve always thought that you see people in their truest sense when they are dining out. Even if you happen to know them, they can’t help but reveal who they truly are.
– The restaurant business has changed 180 degrees since we started. You have very few typical Asian or Italian restaurants anymore. You have pan-Asian, globally inspired, cuisine-agnostic. The whole F & B industry is moving towards a new version of the multi-cuisine format. Today you’ll find that restaurants don’t want to do, for instance, just Chinese, you’ll find dim sums, some sushi, some Thai food. The idea is to please more people through a wider menu – a more gentrified version of the multicuisine menu. Again, when we launched the Magazine Street Kitchen (an experimental kitchen space in Byculla) in 2016, bread had just begun to get noticed. Today, great bread is becoming more mainstream. It isn’t uncommon for people to have sourdough, or croissants, whatever, every day. And mixologists are as big as chefs and are finally getting their due.
— There’s a rising demand for bespoke dining experiences across the country and there is a supply that meets that demand. Food is no longer seen as a means to an end. It signals a lot of things about the host and is more experiential. Overall, food is beginning to take centre stage and is being given far more importance than when we started out.
— If there’s something I’ve learnt about the way Mumbai eats, especially from our Miss T experience (Southeast Asian restaurant launched by Devidayal and Yousuf in 2018), it is that people don’t like restrictions, of any kind. If you tell them you can only have Southeast Asian food at a restaurant, they are like, we don’t want to go there. We also probably launched it a bit prematurely. That may have not been apparent to everyone else, but it made me realise that you can’t fix something once you open a restaurant.
– Just because something works in Mumbai doesn’t mean it will work in Delhi. Or, it might not even work in another part of the same city. I can’t think of taking The Table from Colaba and planting it in, maybe, Bandra. That’s among the many reasons why we haven’t seriously considered opening an outpost in another city. But sometime ago we found out that someone was using our name – with the logo – in Ludhiana. It’s a multi-cuisine buffet restaurant, and someone messaged us on Instagram complaining about the quality of food at our Ludhiana outlet!
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