The Hindu Business Line : <I>Asli</I> butter chicken <I> </I>

Dripping with butter and rich cream, Moti Mahal's rich fare has stolen many a foodie's heart down the years. The restaurant chain receives a modern-day makeover at the hands of its dynamic young owner.

One of Monish Gujral's biggest regrets is that his grandfather, Kundal Lal Gujral, the man who made butter chicken synonymous with Delhi's Punjabi sub-culture, did not make Moti Mahal his family's proprietary trademark. Because just about every city between Delhi and Vancouver has a Moti Mahal raking in big bucks serving butter chicken and creamy dal makhni.

The 58-year-old Delhi landmark started as a dhaba serving Punjabi migrants uprooted by Partition. Kundan Lal Gujral, a larger-than-life figure whom people still remember for his immaculate Pathani suits, handlebar moustache, love for good whisky and the favours he dispensed because of his proximity to Indira Gandhi, would personally serve his guests. His wife would begin each day grinding the masalas, a closely guarded secret, that went into the signature dishes. Eventually, Moti Mahal became the social magnet for Delhi's elite after the Nehru-Gandhi family started patronising it, along with global leaders and celebrities, from Marshal Bulganin to Jacqueline Kennedy.

Priyanka and Robert Vadra continue the family tradition, and BJP General Secretary Arun Jaitley is the restaurant's regular client. The Gujrals have been close to the Congress top brass ever since Nehru was introduced to Moti Mahal by Meher Chand Khanna, who was his minister responsible for the rehabilitation of refugees, but they pride themselves for having entertained leaders from opposite ends of the political spectrum.

To protect this tradition from the dilution that imitators have inflicted on it, Monish Gujral has repositioned Moti Mahal with a contemporary identity (Tandoori Trail), a swish décor and a franchising model that has powered the restaurant's progress from Gurgaon, Delhi's BPO/ITES suburb, to Ludhiana, Panipat, Patna, Indore and Mumbai. Bangalore is Moti Mahal's next target market and Gujral predicts that he'll have "100 restaurants by 2010," up from the present 15.

Growing up with a legacy

Moti Mahal, in Gujral's scheme, will be the north's Saravana Bhavan, or MTR. And his dreams are all locked away in Excel sheets in his well-travelled Acer laptop, as he prepares to bite into a bigger share of the country's Rs 3,500-crore eating-out pie. The potential is enormous, because, as the Euromonitor Consumer Lifestyle Database tells us, of the Rs 3,500 core that India's consuming class spent on eating out in 2003, just Rs 200 crore went to the organised sector.

This is the moment Gujral, a Modern School alumnus, has been waiting for since the day he took his last Class XII exam and joined the Moti Mahal staff in 1983 on a stipend of Rs 700 per month. In the three years Gujral spent pursuing a B.Com degree at Hans Raj College (now better known as Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan's college), he spent his waking hours after college at the restaurant that has become his consuming passion.

His grandfather would share with him secrets of the trade, like the art of portion control. A kilo of tomatoes, Gujral will tell you, yields 250 g of puree, which, in turn, is good for three dishes; a kilo of lentils, likewise, yields 12-13 plates of dal makhani. He can rattle off such statistics without checking with his laptop. He says that his college years spent at Moti Mahal not only helped him buy his first car and finance a round-the-world air ticket, but also gave him a ringside view of the business.

The restaurant industry, according to management consultancy firm KPMG, is poised to grow 25 per cent annually. "As malls multiply, the market for restaurants will see an exponential growth," Gujral rationalises. "Restaurants make malls attractive destinations, and malls assure restaurants the footfalls they need to stay in business." His contention is supported by Euromonitor, which reports that eating out is the most important leisure activity of the Indian consuming class. Even when this class goes shopping, it needs to eat.

Evoking a delectable past

Unlike many business success stories, Moti Mahal's re-branding exercise started with a book of recipes that Gujral co-wrote with veteran journalist Uma Vasudev. For Gujral, the book was as much a tribute to his grandfather — who started working in a Peshawar dhaba from age 10 and invented butter chicken essentially to recycle unsold tandoori chicken — as an opportunity to renew people's interest in the restaurant and develop a sense of nostalgia about its food in a fad-driven market.

At the book release, where the Maurya Sheraton made an exception and allowed Gujral to serve his other famous dish, chicken pakodas, the inheritor of Kundan Lal Gujral's mantle was happily telling the world that Moti Mahal's butter chicken had 50-75 g of Amul butter and 100 g of double cream, and that the dal makhani had a slightly less lethal mix — 50 g of butter and 50-75 g of double cream. In a city where the elite is obsessed with counting calories, the candid declaration gave butter chicken the kind of desirability that you'd associate with forbidden fruit, or any other hedonistic pleasure. Gujral has resuscitated his brand simply by swimming against the tide.

The book also positioned Gujral as an articulate restaurateur who cared for his business. "Would Nehru Centre, London, have called me to speak on `Reclaiming the Curry' if I were just a restaurateur," he asks rhetorically, referring to his recent accomplishment. "The book opened many doors that I didn't know existed." Gujral targeted Delhi and Mumbai's upper crust (he inaugurated his Mumbai ventures, in fact, with book release functions — unusual for restaurant openings).

To appeal to the mass market, and to transplant the Moti Mahal ambience to other cities, Gujral produced a cassette celebrating the restaurant's tradition of qawwali evenings — Shakeela Bano and Shanta Devi, yesteryear's Hindustani semi-classical singing divas, were the stars of Moti Mahal. The next big thing on Gujral's agenda is franchising arrangements with real estate developers around the country. His model is somewhere between the McDonald's model, where the company develops and manages its restaurants everywhere, and the Nirula's tradition of letting franchisees run the restaurants the way they like, after paying a fixed annual fee and sourcing the ingredients from Nirula's.

Gujral's model assures the franchisee 40 per cent of the market rental or 10 per cent of the monthly sales (depending on which is higher). Moti Mahal franchisees own the real estate and have to finance the fixed interiors and civil engineering work. Gujral, in turn, trains the chefs and sources replacements to fill vacancies, prepares `locational menus' (in Mumbai, for instance, the emphasis is on seafood and coconut-based gravies; in Gurgaon, pasta with red Thai curry is the hot favourite), and conducts quality control audits. "I am now securing my supply lines and standardising the masalas," says Gujral. "I'll then be able to assure uniform quality to my franchisees and take advantage of bulk discounts."

The restaurant story

Gujral is bullish about the future of the restaurant industry. "There's a reason why the financial sector is looking at this industry very closely," he says. "Restaurants assure a 35-40 per cent yearly return on investment."

While location is very important, the quality of the product is the all-important differentiator.

"A mall can assure you footfalls, not sales," reasons Gujral. "It provides amenities like air-conditioned ambience, assured power and water supply, and security, but the rentals are high and so are the common area maintenance charges. If you don't succeed, your losses will be much higher than what you'd be landed with in a stand-alone restaurant."

To recover your investment and running costs, you must sell a minimum of 200 dishes a day (assuming each dish costs you Rs 75 but is priced at Rs 225, which means you keep for yourself a margin of Rs 150). To sell 200 dishes, you must have over 100 people visiting your restaurant every day. More importantly, you've got to sell much more than 200 dishes to take back net profits. Many restaurants in malls find these targets too hard to achieve, which is why they flounder quickly in a fiercely competitive market like Gurgaon.

As Gujral logs out, you're left with no illusions about the restaurant business. It's a very serious business being driven by systems-led businessmen. Gujral learnt the tricks of the trade, and the recipes his cooks shared almost under duress, by being a good student of his grandfather who had never been to a school. By giving Moti Mahal a new image, he is making sure that his grandfather's legacy outlasts him and his children.

Picture by the author

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