Curry On
On a sunny Friday in mid-September, 140 Spadina Ave. in downtown Toronto is buzzing with the tail end of the lunch crowd. Customers sit slurping curries at cafeteria-style tables, while a lone man stands off to the side, focused intently on his BlackBerry. Dressed in a black jacket and dark, fitted denim, Nipun Sharma, at 34, could easily play the
stalwart young hero in a Bollywood film, but for some grey hair. “It wasn’t like this five years ago,” he points out, laughing. That was before Rasoee.
Born and raised in New Delhi, Sharma calls himself “the first non-chef” of a family that’s been in the foodservice business for four generations. In 1990, his parents migrated to the Greater Toronto area, where they ran various mom and pop-style restaurants with business partners until they opened up Rasoee, the Indian Kitchen in Scarborough, on their own in 1996. “The response was fantastic,” Sharma says. “We just didn’t know how to expand it.”
He says ‘we’ now, but at the time Sharma had no intention of working in the restaurant business. Having graduated from McGill University in 1997 with a commerce degree, Sharma headed straight for a career in investment banking on Wall Street. But eventually he grew restless.
“I was constantly thinking about entrepreneurial projects, how to be my own boss,” he says. “I wanted to create something fantastic as opposed to being a nine-to-five robot, existing just to pay bills.” In the back of his mind, he pondered the Rasoee expansion idea his father had abandoned. (Because Rasoee’s customer base was largely Indian, and Sharma’s father thought only Indian chefs could successfully execute the menu, he decided growing the business on a large scale seemed too difficult.) In his spare time, Sharma developed a new plan that would modernize his family’s traditional Indian restaurants into a unique dining concept. To do that he needed to overcome the obstacles his father could not — that meant creating a cuisine with mass appeal and eliminating the need for experts in the kitchen.
“I’ve travelled around the world and my father’s food is still the best,” Sharma says. But he felt Indian food needed to be more approachable. “My thought was that the only reason people would go to an Indian restaurant in Canada is if they were escorted by an Indian or a British person.” He blames this partly on the menus. “Typical menus are long, people aren’t sure what to expect.” He adds that many Indian restaurants look mysterious to those unfamiliar with the cuisine. So four years ago, when he opened a new Rasoee on Spadina, he picked a venue with a window running the entire length of the restaurant. “People walk by and see it’s not some weird, threatening place. They can see it’s clean…which gives them comfort about any health and food safety concerns they may have.”
In order to reach customers who don’t eat Indian food regularly (which Sharma estimates is a majority of his clientele), he decided to adapt the concept to reflect the most North American of eateries — the quick-service restaurant. Although Rasoee’s design wasn’t where he wanted it, he put it on the backburner to focus on the food. The menu had to be interesting and authentic, but palatable to westerners’ tastes and lifestyles. “You don’t want to create a meal where you have to take a nap after,” he says. “The lunch crowd is our bread and butter — people eat this and then have to go back to work.” Rasoee’s recipes use cholesterol-free canola oil instead of ghee (clarified butter) and they’re prepped to appeal to a universal palate. “We kept the spices but dropped the heat element,” says Sharma.
So how did a “non-chef” redevelop dishes like butter chicken or channa masala? “We took the art of Indian cooking and turned it into a science,” he says. Using his father Satish’s recipes as the starting point, dishes are adapted in a test kitchen using the same ingredients, until the new dish tastes identical but takes less time to make. Every recipe must also pass the Satish taste-test. When he can’t tell the difference between his own and the one from the test kitchen, it gets the go-ahead.
And sometimes it works the other way. Sharma’s goal is to keep his menu aligned with current trends. If he wants to develop an omega-rich naan, he talks to food scientists who determine what ingredients need to be included. Then he brings them to his father and two other chefs the family worked with in India, to bring it to life.
Every finalized recipe goes to one of four HACCP-inspected plants that produce Rasoee’s food. A fundamental issue QSRs face is consistency and ease of operation, Sharma says. To solve this, the plants ship the food at a stage where it’s almost ready to serve, and it’s finished on-site using innovative rethermalization technology. Recently a food critic wrote about “how the chef at Rasoee did this and that,” Sharma says, adding, “It’s part of the illusion.”
Rasoee restaurants are run by two or three minimum-wage-level staff, with zero restaurant experience. But because of the fine-tuned concept — “an automated kitchen of sorts” — people can be trained in about three days. “It leaves staff to focus on only one thing,” Sharma says, “Running a clean restaurant with a smile on their face.” All franchisees will get their food from the same plants, minimizing the potential for human error. The food will also be served on newly designed plates, which effectively control portioning and eliminate waste.
With the recipes and staffing issues reconfigured, Sharma set out to determine Rasoee’s effectiveness as a franchise. About 14 months ago, his answer came in the form of Mike Craig, one-time owner and president of Manchu Wok, who took a quick look at Rasoee’s concept after a mutual friend brought it to his attention. “I wrote down all the [past] mistakes I’d seen, the aggravation points, and [realized] Rasoee had eliminated them all,” Craig says. He calls Rasoee the “perfect franchise model,” and was so impressed he came out of retirement to become director and CEO.
Together, Sharma and Craig completed the required paperwork to become a franchise in Canada, creating a franchise agreement that uses a fixed rate, and doesn’t chain franchisees to the store (in-store cameras will allow them to watch locations on the Web.) They also secured additional investors and held a focus-group study to re-brand the restaurant. A design concept called Vastu, created by Shikatani Lacroix, was the winner.
“Vastu is about harmonizing body and soul and [providing] an oasis from hectic life,” Sharma says. He’s not sure when the two existing locations will be overhauled, but every new franchise that opens — which he plans to steer toward quick-casual models rather than QSRs — will conform to Vastu’s soothing design scheme. The specially designed plates currently in the manufacturing stage, will also be branded, and more importantly, they’ll be non-breakable and reusable. Sharma embraces sustainability, calling it a trend that’s here to stay, and one which Vastu inherently reflects.
The next step is aggressively courting franchisees. Sharma hopes to open at least 10 locations in the next year and says the Canadian market is showing a lot of interest, as is the U.S. (the August issue of Restaurant Business lists Rasoee as one of five concepts about to storm U.S. shores), the U.K., and even Dubai. “Indian food should easily become one of the biggest cuisines in North America,” Sharma says. “We are the first to make this concept saleable, but in one year someone with more resources could come along and beat me to it. Now it’s a race, a question of who’s going to get there first.”