Amlani and his Food Factory

The restaurateur who is nourished by the spirit of the youth. And it’s good business

Over coffee at Colaba Social, the Mumbai outpost of Riyaaz Amlani’s newest chain of concept cafés, the restaurateur tells me about the “serendipities” and “hook- ups” taking place there. “Writers are hooking up with graphic designers, who are meeting photographers here,” he says. While he is playing the part of a matchmaker of sorts, the stories aren’t of the romantic variety. “We are putting freelance professionals in the same matrix; we are creating an ecosystem where you can work independently but also collaborate. But more importantly, we are putting them on the same table, so they end up talking,” says Amlani about the concept of Social, which he also recently launched in New Delhi and Bangalore.

According to Amlani, youngsters today do not want to meet at a café without some creative purpose. “In my day, kids wanted to just hang out and waste time. Today, the young want to work, build projects, be out there doing stuff but as long as they are doing it together,” he observes. Therefore, Social. It offers wifi, coffee, community tables and a real chance of meeting the web developer of your dreams.

And once again the serial restaurateur, owner of Impresario Hospitality and Entertainment Pvt Ltd, gets it right with the young who he says are the inspiration and the audience for everything he creates. “I am very nourished by the spirit of the youth, what they want to do. Although now I am a little paranoid about that, because I am over the hill,” laughs the 39-year-old.

So then how does he still manage to stay relevant and connected with the youth? He shadows his 26-year- old brother and his friends, he confesses. Although, it has a lot to do with his own personality—quick to laugh, affable and interested in the stories of others (when we finish our interview, he wants to know more about me and my work). He looks like someone who would be quite easy guffawing at cat memes with a group of 24-year-olds and buying them a round.

Amlani may seem like the grandfather of the restaurant business (and the only other Indian restaurateur besides Olive’s AD Singh, who has successfully managed to create multi-city chains of cafés and fine-dining establishments), but he started out only a little over ten years ago. He opened the iconic Mocha café in Mumbai at a time when Udipi restaurants or five-star hotels were the only places to ‘hang out’.

He always had an entrepreneurial streak (his first venture was a footwear store in Mumbai), but worked in the entertainment business for a while before quitting it for hospitality. An innate feeling of “civic pride” and a desire to create “experiences” for people in his city brought about the idea of a Turkish style café. You could order coffee, sheesha or cake, and lose all track of time at his Mocha outlet near Churchgate. It soon went on to become a chain.

“I am not in the food business, I am in the leisure business,” he clarifies. Not just Social, most of his cafés have a community angle—from music gigs and movie screenings to organising backpack trips. Today, his company operates 35 restaurants across 11 cities under various brands. The number was only six until 2008, when the company received an infusion of Rs 25 crore from Beacon India Private Equity Fund, and then a second round of funding of Rs 35 crore from Beacon and Mirah Hospitality in 2011.

The reasons he started out in this business were relevant then, but what motivates him now? It is a question he asks himself everyday, he says, going into self-reflective mode. “I enjoy what I do. In a sense it’s one big candy shop. I get to indulge all my passions and call it research, have a lot of fun, meet interesting people and be involved in a small way in making a city what it is,” he says, after some thought.

Gresham Fernandes, executive chef for fine dining at Impresario, who has been with Amlani for a decade, says, “From the designers to the chefs, he gives everyone creative freedom.” This is Amlani’s generosity of spirit, he adds, and it gives him and his projects a positive energy. “That guy really isn’t making much money for himself—the bottom line or profit is never as important to Riyaaz as giving value to the customer. He really just wants people to have a good time. I cannot think of any other person in Mumbai I would like to work with more,” says Fernandes.

But since most of the money was put into Impresario, do words like ‘scaling’ and ‘chain’ dent the ambitions of creating ‘handmade’ restaurants, the company philosophy? “I don’t want to ever get so big that I stop personalising,” he says, “Yes, the fact that I cannot be at every restaurant, knowing every customer’s name, is a constant problem for me. So what I do is, build restaurants that have character and they hopefully develop their own personality.”

And that’s where ambience plays a big role—from the mismatched furniture of Mocha to the graffiti on the walls of his Smoke House Deli chain that is localised to incorporate the vibe of the neighbourhood. Each café in the Social chain is named after the area it is housed in. Every restaurant seems like an extension of his personality—casual and accessible. Amlani’s favourite part of the business is idea generation. Once a year, he and Fernandes travel together for inspiration. “We don’t just eat at fancy places, we want to see the local restaurants where people spend time. And he really gets deeply involved in everything, I have seen him cry at a qawwali,” says Fernandes, who is more of a friend than an employee.

Music is often an idea trigger. “I think I could be a DJ,” laughs Amlani, adding that his favourite free-time activity is making playlists for his restaurants. “I am a bit obsessed about that. A lot of my restaurants have been inspired by music. When you put on some jazz and you think about the kind of environment in which you would be listening to that, the cocktail you would drink, the furniture, lighting, food and suddenly you have a restaurant idea!” While briefing the architect, he plays the chosen music in the background to help get across the mood he has in mind. “It is important to build a restaurant where there is a tonality match—the menu, table, chair, music all have to be of the same chord. Otherwise it jars,” he says.

As we discuss Amlani’s pursuits away from his business of leisure, he tells us about his wife and his newborn child. The long-time bachelor tied the knot in 2012 with Kiran Chaudhry, who was a UK-based lawyer when they met in 2011. About two months ago, they became parents to a boy. “It is the best feeling. Have one… or ten, I highly recommend it,” he smiles.

Even though business keeps him travelling to Bangalore, New Delhi and Pune, he now makes sure to keep time out for his son. While in Mumbai, his day usually starts at 8 am, “when a trainer comes home”, he says, adding a rueful, “to no avail”. The rest of the day is spent discussing ideas and plans with his team at the company’s Mumbai office. “I prefer calling myself a ‘chief experiential officer’ rather than a chief executive officer. My role is customer facing—what they experience,” he says. And food is the biggest part of that.

Recently, he spent five consecutive days doing food trials from 11 am to 6 pm. “It’s honestly the most exhausting thing you can do,” he says, “your entire energy goes in digesting the food.” But as someone who ends up playing the role of a “bridge between the chef and the customer”, the final vote of what is going to be on your plate is Amlani’s. “Chefs tend to be purists, but customers are used to certain things and you have to give that to them.” Being consumer oriented has been important to him ever since he began: “I never approached things from a restaurateur’s perspective. That was the edge I had, I didn’t know what it was to be a restaurateur. There was a certain amount of naiveté and it worked in my favour.”

He preserves his newcomer’s spirit and pure love of food with side efforts such as Gypsy Kitchen. A pop-up restaurant format that he describes as a “food and heritage conservation project”, it grants chefs and housewives a platform to showcase their talent and lets lovers of food submit to the experience.

But then, not all experiments work in this unpredictable market. While Amlani may have a Midas touch in the casual-dining format, his ambitious Smoke House Room, which was all flair and fine dining with cutting edge cooking techniques, proved far less of a draw. “It was my finest work but also my biggest failure,” he says. The concept of a 12-course ‘degustation menu’ that was meant to be a sensory experience was probably ahead of its time three years ago. “We put a lot of capital behind it and we did it in Delhi, which we thought was leading the food revolution in India. It worked on modern principles, and on some level people couldn’t understand the concept.” This was also the one time he admits that he let his and his star chef Fernandes’ ego get the better of them. “My biggest learning was, ‘Don’t take yourself too seriously’ and ‘Don’t try to change the world.’ This business is a slow tango.”

More than a decade dancing this ‘slow tango’, he harbours a dream of someday just “vegetating and being a stay-at-home dad”. “I am getting to a stage where my involvement will become less and less necessary and the next generation in the company will be able to take over.” He wants to be able to grow fresh vegetables and work on a farm-to-table project, so that the new generation doesn’t grow up thinking carrots come out of a packet. But will it be easy to give up the business? “I don’t know. Maybe I will want to come back or I’ll be extremely happy and wonder why didn’t I do it sooner!”

About The Author

Rachana Nakra