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Secret Sauce : Inspiring Stories of Great Indian Restaurants
Please Read Brand New, International Softcover Edition, Printed in black and white pages, minor self wear on the cover or pages, Sale restriction may be printed on the book, but Book name, contents, and author are exactly same as Hardcover Edition. Fast delivery through DHL/FedEx express.
244 pages, Hardcover
Published March 31, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 12, 2020
Fascinating to know how some of the most popular restaurants in India began their journey, some of which started in the pre-independence era.
September 20, 2018
Interesting book for foodies and restaurant lovers. Skips the economics but gives a brief idea and history behind India's some of the very iconic restaurants.
January 22, 2021
The modern restaurant is not an entirely new creation. The activity of eating outside the home has existed for thousands of years. The term ‘restaurant’ itself, first appeared in the 18th century in France, designating a bolstering meat broth which people consumed to invigorate the body. It was not until the French Revolution and ensuing industrialisation that, culinary establishments such as we know them today began to appear and develop.
The history of Indian cuisine is as old as time and as renewed as a newly minted coin. Chefs keep the institution alive in the countless iconic restaurants which dot the country. Everyday brings a new tread to savour the aroma of yesterday.
For a long time, it was believed that a certain Monsieur Boulanger opened Paris’s first restaurant in the year 1765, and that it sported the sign ‘Boulanger débite des restaurants divins’ (Boulanger sells restoratives fit for the gods). It was only lately that an expert in European history debunked this story, saying no such person existed. In any case, it was the first establishment to use the word ‘restaurant’, a place that offered ‘restoratives’ or ‘sustenance’.
In India, we have no such story – reliable or mythical – of how the first contemporary restaurant came about. This book, though offers no historical timeline of extravagant eateries in India, does focus on forty of India's most prosperous restaurants, not just as milestones and must-visit endpoints, but also as businesses that have withstood the trial of time and sustained their canons of dining and gastronomic brilliance.
Writer and restaurant analyst Priya Bala and Jayanth Narayanan, a profound eyewitness of the restaurant business from his viewpoint as a restaurateur, write, ‘Besides serving as an inspiration to restaurateurs across the country and whetting the appetite of the ever-growing breed of food lovers, we’ve also aimed to make Secret Sauce a history of the restaurant business in India. In a country where the wisdom of eons dictates that we are what we eat, this would then also be a chronicle of us as a people and as a culture.’
The duo divides this book into the subsequent 40 chapters (each chapter fitted with a groovy tag line):
1) Adyar Ananda Bhavan - A sweet stall that became a super-sized chain
2) Barbeque Nation - Value for money + unlimited food + great service = happy customers
3) Bhojohori Manna - Friendships and the forging of a large Bengali food chain
4) Britannia & Co. - Keeping alive the quintessence of the Irani cafe
5) Buhari - Bringer of high style to Chennai
6) Bukhara - Minimalist menu, mega bucks and more celeb guests than you can count
7) China Garden - A success story that could have been scripted by Bollywood
8) Diva - Early architect of standalone success
9) Domino’s India - Getting Indians to love pizza and carving out a massive slice of the business
10) Farzi Café - Future-ready food business
11) Flurys - The tea room that belongs to a city
12) Glenary’s - As old as the hills
13) Hard Rock Cafe & Shiro - Entertainment as enterprise
14) Indian Accent - Modern Indian, plated for the globe
15) Karavalli - Ethnic cuisine and authenticity at the heart of it
16) Karim - Food from royal kitchens for the common man
17) Kesar da Dhaba - Shining landmark in the Golden City
18) Koshy’s - A slice of old Bangalore
19) Laxmi Mishthan Bhandar - A pinnacle in the Pink City
20) Leopold Café - Fame, notoriety and a full house
21) Longuinhos – Keeping memories alive in Margao
22) Mainland China - Class and style
23) Martin’s Corner – The little store that became a local legend
24) Moti Mahal - Where the tandoori trail begins
25) MTR - South Indian classic, culinary icon
26) Nizam’s - How the kathi roll came to be
27) Olive Bar & Kitchen - All things to all people
28) Paradise - Ruling over the biryani capital
29) Paragon - How a reluctant restaurateur built Kerala’s biggest brand
30) Peter Cat & Mocambo - Catchy names, class acts
31) Rendezvous - Indian warmth in the cool French quarter
32) Saravana Bhavan - Taking south India to the world
33) Sardar Refreshment - Winning with working-class food
34) Shree Thaker Bhojanalay - Thali business pioneer
35) Social by Impresario - Gathering place of the millennials
36) Souza Lobo - Success on a scenic beach
37) Subway India - Sandwich-maker and standard-bearer for franchising
38) Tunday Kababi - The Lucknow legend proving cheap can be excellent
39) Vidyarthi Bhavan - Short menu, long queues
40) Vishalla - Human environment, redesigned
Take the Leopold Café & Bar, as case in point. A milestone in Mumbai the Leopold opened in 1871 originally as a store, and then transmuted into a restaurant. Today, virtually a century and a half later, it continues to be enormously hip and happening and customers recurrently wait in a queue before finding seating.
There are other similar restaurants which opened at the turn of the century in India and continue to be completely operational and lucrative, and became landmarks in their territories. Today, their iconic status and absolute wistfulness is adequate to drive business.
That doesn’t however allow Bengaluru’s much-loved MTR, which opened in 1924 and is credited with ‘inventing’ the rava idli, to recline and trust on past glory. Its third-generation owners are on a growth spree, even outside India. The MTR story summarizes how a pre-Independence era eatery has made a smooth transition to the age of the millennials.
Similar century-old eateries are paeans also to a groundbreaking spirit. Those early restaurateurs ventured into a realm which promised no glamour or celebrity status as is the case today, when ‘I want to have my own restaurant’ is a common refrain.
Delhi’s post-Partition disorder saw Kundal Lal Gujral, a professional in tandoori fare in Peshawar, crossing over to create butter chicken at Moti Mahal, a brand that continues to withstand despite upheavals.
Meanwhile in Kolkata and Darjeeling, some decades before Independence, elegant tea rooms were set up to cater to the sahibs and memsaabs of the British Raj – Flurys on Kolkata’s Park Street and Glenary’s in Darjeeling’s Chauk Bazaar find a mention in every tour guide to these cities.
Not everything in those days was about sophistication and West-influenced patisserie though.
In Delhi’s bustling Jama Masjid area, royal cuisine was being served to the common man at Karim, by a descendant of the cooks of former Mughal emperors. What inspired those early restaurateurs to enter the food business and how did they manage to pass the baton on to the generations that followed or to new owners?
These are questions that this book raises and conclusions are chronicled here.
The restaurants that opened for business pre- and just after Independence brought a sole antique and commercial spirit to the Indian food services business. But another big upwelling took place in post-liberalization India. As an increasing number of Indians became enamoured with fine dining, the urban middle-class, armed with throwaway incomes, decided that food was not mere nourishment – it could be a leisure activity, even an entertaining departure.
Few cities in other parts of the world have hotels that are particularly known for their food. India bucks the trend and these trend-setters have their own tales to tell. Outside the rarefied environs of luxury hotels, in a charmingly rustic setting, there is Vishalla, in Ahmedabad – an outlier for forty years. This was one man’s dream that became an anti-urban idyll and went on to become successful against all odds.
The largest South Indian chains, Saravana Bhavan and Adayar Ananda Bhavan, had no such multifarious questions to tackle. From the very start, their mission has been to serve acquainted foods to locals at reasonable prices in a clean, hygienic setting. Their plan worked, and today their balance sheets boast of healthy bottom-lines and they have the self-assurance to enlarge at a rate food brands under multinational companies (MNCs) would greed.
Building large restaurant businesses together with these young Turks were ventures such as Speciality, Anjan Chatterjee’s company which gave us ‘Mainland China’ and ‘Oh! Calcutta’. Soon, ‘Barbeque Nation’ arrived on the scene and grew even as it tasted accomplishment, having tapped into the Indian customer’s proclivity for eat-all-you-want offerings.
How did these restaurant businesses come to device and comprehend the Indian customer’s tastes and readiness to spend – which even professional market surveys find difficult to pin down – and create products and experiences of aspirational value?
The stories of these mega Indian restaurant businesses set out to answer this question that every restaurateur asks.
The authors ask only that you appreciate how daunting a task it is to put a list such as this together, skewed as it is bound to be by subjectivity.
This book is a work of love. Grab a copy.
The history of Indian cuisine is as old as time and as renewed as a newly minted coin. Chefs keep the institution alive in the countless iconic restaurants which dot the country. Everyday brings a new tread to savour the aroma of yesterday.
For a long time, it was believed that a certain Monsieur Boulanger opened Paris’s first restaurant in the year 1765, and that it sported the sign ‘Boulanger débite des restaurants divins’ (Boulanger sells restoratives fit for the gods). It was only lately that an expert in European history debunked this story, saying no such person existed. In any case, it was the first establishment to use the word ‘restaurant’, a place that offered ‘restoratives’ or ‘sustenance’.
In India, we have no such story – reliable or mythical – of how the first contemporary restaurant came about. This book, though offers no historical timeline of extravagant eateries in India, does focus on forty of India's most prosperous restaurants, not just as milestones and must-visit endpoints, but also as businesses that have withstood the trial of time and sustained their canons of dining and gastronomic brilliance.
Writer and restaurant analyst Priya Bala and Jayanth Narayanan, a profound eyewitness of the restaurant business from his viewpoint as a restaurateur, write, ‘Besides serving as an inspiration to restaurateurs across the country and whetting the appetite of the ever-growing breed of food lovers, we’ve also aimed to make Secret Sauce a history of the restaurant business in India. In a country where the wisdom of eons dictates that we are what we eat, this would then also be a chronicle of us as a people and as a culture.’
The duo divides this book into the subsequent 40 chapters (each chapter fitted with a groovy tag line):
1) Adyar Ananda Bhavan - A sweet stall that became a super-sized chain
2) Barbeque Nation - Value for money + unlimited food + great service = happy customers
3) Bhojohori Manna - Friendships and the forging of a large Bengali food chain
4) Britannia & Co. - Keeping alive the quintessence of the Irani cafe
5) Buhari - Bringer of high style to Chennai
6) Bukhara - Minimalist menu, mega bucks and more celeb guests than you can count
7) China Garden - A success story that could have been scripted by Bollywood
8) Diva - Early architect of standalone success
9) Domino’s India - Getting Indians to love pizza and carving out a massive slice of the business
10) Farzi Café - Future-ready food business
11) Flurys - The tea room that belongs to a city
12) Glenary’s - As old as the hills
13) Hard Rock Cafe & Shiro - Entertainment as enterprise
14) Indian Accent - Modern Indian, plated for the globe
15) Karavalli - Ethnic cuisine and authenticity at the heart of it
16) Karim - Food from royal kitchens for the common man
17) Kesar da Dhaba - Shining landmark in the Golden City
18) Koshy’s - A slice of old Bangalore
19) Laxmi Mishthan Bhandar - A pinnacle in the Pink City
20) Leopold Café - Fame, notoriety and a full house
21) Longuinhos – Keeping memories alive in Margao
22) Mainland China - Class and style
23) Martin’s Corner – The little store that became a local legend
24) Moti Mahal - Where the tandoori trail begins
25) MTR - South Indian classic, culinary icon
26) Nizam’s - How the kathi roll came to be
27) Olive Bar & Kitchen - All things to all people
28) Paradise - Ruling over the biryani capital
29) Paragon - How a reluctant restaurateur built Kerala’s biggest brand
30) Peter Cat & Mocambo - Catchy names, class acts
31) Rendezvous - Indian warmth in the cool French quarter
32) Saravana Bhavan - Taking south India to the world
33) Sardar Refreshment - Winning with working-class food
34) Shree Thaker Bhojanalay - Thali business pioneer
35) Social by Impresario - Gathering place of the millennials
36) Souza Lobo - Success on a scenic beach
37) Subway India - Sandwich-maker and standard-bearer for franchising
38) Tunday Kababi - The Lucknow legend proving cheap can be excellent
39) Vidyarthi Bhavan - Short menu, long queues
40) Vishalla - Human environment, redesigned
Take the Leopold Café & Bar, as case in point. A milestone in Mumbai the Leopold opened in 1871 originally as a store, and then transmuted into a restaurant. Today, virtually a century and a half later, it continues to be enormously hip and happening and customers recurrently wait in a queue before finding seating.
There are other similar restaurants which opened at the turn of the century in India and continue to be completely operational and lucrative, and became landmarks in their territories. Today, their iconic status and absolute wistfulness is adequate to drive business.
That doesn’t however allow Bengaluru’s much-loved MTR, which opened in 1924 and is credited with ‘inventing’ the rava idli, to recline and trust on past glory. Its third-generation owners are on a growth spree, even outside India. The MTR story summarizes how a pre-Independence era eatery has made a smooth transition to the age of the millennials.
Similar century-old eateries are paeans also to a groundbreaking spirit. Those early restaurateurs ventured into a realm which promised no glamour or celebrity status as is the case today, when ‘I want to have my own restaurant’ is a common refrain.
Delhi’s post-Partition disorder saw Kundal Lal Gujral, a professional in tandoori fare in Peshawar, crossing over to create butter chicken at Moti Mahal, a brand that continues to withstand despite upheavals.
Meanwhile in Kolkata and Darjeeling, some decades before Independence, elegant tea rooms were set up to cater to the sahibs and memsaabs of the British Raj – Flurys on Kolkata’s Park Street and Glenary’s in Darjeeling’s Chauk Bazaar find a mention in every tour guide to these cities.
Not everything in those days was about sophistication and West-influenced patisserie though.
In Delhi’s bustling Jama Masjid area, royal cuisine was being served to the common man at Karim, by a descendant of the cooks of former Mughal emperors. What inspired those early restaurateurs to enter the food business and how did they manage to pass the baton on to the generations that followed or to new owners?
These are questions that this book raises and conclusions are chronicled here.
The restaurants that opened for business pre- and just after Independence brought a sole antique and commercial spirit to the Indian food services business. But another big upwelling took place in post-liberalization India. As an increasing number of Indians became enamoured with fine dining, the urban middle-class, armed with throwaway incomes, decided that food was not mere nourishment – it could be a leisure activity, even an entertaining departure.
Few cities in other parts of the world have hotels that are particularly known for their food. India bucks the trend and these trend-setters have their own tales to tell. Outside the rarefied environs of luxury hotels, in a charmingly rustic setting, there is Vishalla, in Ahmedabad – an outlier for forty years. This was one man’s dream that became an anti-urban idyll and went on to become successful against all odds.
The largest South Indian chains, Saravana Bhavan and Adayar Ananda Bhavan, had no such multifarious questions to tackle. From the very start, their mission has been to serve acquainted foods to locals at reasonable prices in a clean, hygienic setting. Their plan worked, and today their balance sheets boast of healthy bottom-lines and they have the self-assurance to enlarge at a rate food brands under multinational companies (MNCs) would greed.
Building large restaurant businesses together with these young Turks were ventures such as Speciality, Anjan Chatterjee’s company which gave us ‘Mainland China’ and ‘Oh! Calcutta’. Soon, ‘Barbeque Nation’ arrived on the scene and grew even as it tasted accomplishment, having tapped into the Indian customer’s proclivity for eat-all-you-want offerings.
How did these restaurant businesses come to device and comprehend the Indian customer’s tastes and readiness to spend – which even professional market surveys find difficult to pin down – and create products and experiences of aspirational value?
The stories of these mega Indian restaurant businesses set out to answer this question that every restaurateur asks.
The authors ask only that you appreciate how daunting a task it is to put a list such as this together, skewed as it is bound to be by subjectivity.
This book is a work of love. Grab a copy.
February 6, 2019
Good book for understanding how some of the good restaurants are successfully running their operation for many years.
Must for entrepreneurs aspiring for start of the restaurant and those who defined themselves as food connoisseur...
Must for entrepreneurs aspiring for start of the restaurant and those who defined themselves as food connoisseur...
November 20, 2018
Nice reading
It is good reading not as amazing as the first one.. But useful insight and challenges face while running food business
It is good reading not as amazing as the first one.. But useful insight and challenges face while running food business
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews