Why India’s celebrity chefs are stepping away from the restaurant setup

Recent years have seen chefs after famous chef walking away from the traditional restaurant kitchen setup, reshaping the country’s foodscape as they find inventive new ways to connect with customers 

This monsoon, popular pastry chef Pooja Dhingra is working to combine two of her favourite things: chai and hot chocolate. A Le15 chai spice hot chocolate mix is in the works, says the Mumbai chef, and will be the latest offering on her website, which ships across the country.

When the pandemic and its many lockdowns forced Dhingra to close down the popular South Mumbai branch of her cafe in 2020, she quickly shifted focus on the booming online space. Le15 Patisserie’s online operations means that she can provide cake mixes, her signature macarons and more — to multiple cities, beyond Mumbai. She explains the “several factors that made us decide to take on multi-city delivery. Scaling FMCG across India was an easier option since we could control production and quality by producing everything under one roof. Setting up standalone stores in separate cities would be more capital intensive, require a higher operational setup, and would take much longer to execute.”

Though Dhingra loves feeling connected with her customers one-on-one, she is also vocal about the positives of going online. “Currently, 15% of our business comes from consumers outside Bombay. We’re seeing this number grow every day.” It also offers some curious insights about her customer base. She says, “What was super interesting to see was that while our hot chocolate was a bestseller in the northern states, it even did well in hotter cities like Goa.”

Dhingra is not the only Indian chef to have segued beyond the kitchen. In recent years, many famous chefs, like Manu Chandra and Thomas Zacharias, stepped away from restaurant brands almost synonymous with their name. Neither restaurant nor chef seems to have suffered from this mutual parting of ways.

In fact, it has given the latter opportunities to explore their love of food in completely different ways.

While Zacharias took Instagram by storm with his travels exploring varied food cultures of India, eventually channelling it all into his recently-launched platform Locavore, Chandra’s bespoke catering service, Single Thread Catering, made its presence felt at Cannes within the very first month of its existence.

TextEditorOver the past few years, particularly the ones dominated by the pandemic, which accelerated some career decisions, chefs across India have become increasingly aware of the wide scope that lies outside traditional restaurant kitchens. But for aspiring chefs still figuring out their path, Chandra has some words of advice: “I’ve been in restaurants for 20 years before I started doing this [catering] as a structured business. At the end of the day, the food industry is based on production. As long as your output is good, you will do well.”