At Martin's Corner in Goa, Carafina Pereira, the matriarch, watches as the masala is prepared for the crabs and fish. The popular restaurant got a boost when Sachin Tendulkar listed it as one of his favourite eateries. Some of the best eateries in the country have been catalogued in Priya Bala and Jayanth Narayanan’s Secret Sauce (HarperCollins). The authors had an informal launch recently at Vidyarthi Bhavan.
The Bengaluru-based authors, have profiled 40 iconic restaurants across India. Priya is a food writer who has been following the restaurant industry for nearly two decades. Jayanth, an entrepreneur, who runs the Mani’s Dum Biryani chain of restaurants, has an insider’s perspective of the restaurant business. “Featuring these 40 restaurants involved a lot of travelling and took close to two years to complete,” says Priya.
Talking of the inspiration behind the project, Priya says, “Showcasing inspirational stories for aspiring restaurateurs may be our basic directive, but the stimulus was also our previous book, Start Up Your Restaurant (HarperCollins) where we spoke to several restaurateurs for their inputs and advice. We thought their fascinating stories and experiences had to be told in a separate book.”
Priya and Jayanth thought that with the surge in eating out, there would be an interest in knowing what goes behind the scenes in the country's most successful restaurants. “ Secret Sauce is also our way of paying tribute to the restaurateurs who have managed to thrive in a notoriously challenging industry. It is a modest effort to record their stories for posterity,” says Priya. Speaking about the parameters for their choices, Priya says there wasn’t a set formula apart from looking for a combination of good food priced right and the passion and drive of the owners. “The first criterion for an indicator of success is the number of years a restaurant has been in business. This becomes important when you realise that more than half the restaurants that open in this country shut down within two years. So, we set a cut-off of 25 years. There are very few newer restaurants included in our book that have made it big in a short time.”
Priya and Jayanth have also tried to be as pan-Indian as possible, featuring restaurants in Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Hyderabad, Amritsar, Jaipur, Calicut, Goa and Darjeeling. The idea was to create as eclectic a mix as possible with restaurants serving different cuisines, formats, budgets, styles. “One of the striking things we noticed was a restaurant’s focus on a few dishes. Take, for instance, Vidyarthi Bhavan’s masala dose or Paragon’s subtle Moplah-style biryani in Calicut. There is also the palak paneer at Kesar da Dhaba in Amritsar and the Tunday Kebab in Lucknow...each has a history,” explains Priya.
Describing the book as a useful resource for students of hotel management who want to set up their own food ventures, Priya says the book will be popular with “food lovers who want to know what keeps their favourite restaurants going.”
