Hunger Inc: The Brutal Reality Of Building Restaurants In India | Table 1 with Vir Sanghvi

ELI5/TLDR

Vir Sanghvi sits down with the three guys behind Bombay Canteen, O Pedro, Bombay Sweet Shop, Veronica’s, and Papa’s — Sameer, Yash, and Hussain. They started in 2015 trying to do “modern Indian” without the liquid nitrogen, got yelled at by entitled diners for not serving butter chicken, lost their co-founder Floyd Cardoz to early COVID, and somewhere along the way figured out that the moat in Indian restaurants isn’t the food — it’s the service. The conversation is part war story, part founder origin story, part how-the-sausage-gets-made.

The Full Story

The opening pitch nobody had heard before

When Sameer Seth met Vir at the President Hotel bar in 2014, modern Indian dining basically meant two things: throwing liquid nitrogen at something, or doing French-ified plating. Bombay Canteen wanted a third option — cook the way Indians actually cook at home, change the menu every three or four months with the seasons, use only Indian ingredients, serve it as small plates and large plates (chhotas and badas).

This sounds obvious in 2026. In 2014, no Indian restaurant changed its menu seasonally. Going to a sit-down place meant North Indian or South Indian, with nothing in the middle.

“At that moment in time, there was no such thing as modern Indian food.”

The pushback was brutal. People showed up demanding chicken tikka masala. The first TripAdvisor review came from a guy who had a shouting match with Yash because his friend (a GM at Oberoi) didn’t get a table on a busy night. As he walked to his Mercedes, he told them they’d be shut in six months.

“It was soul-crushing, literally.”

Three guys who took the long way around

Yash Bhanage went to hotel management college in Goa and got told by his principal that since he was tall, he should join the front desk. Salary: 8,500 rupees. He turned down a 30,000-rupee offer to be a Jet Airways steward. Worked his way through the Hyatt as a waiter at Celini, then Cornell, then Chicago for Fairmont, then Singapore as a bar manager and — briefly — poolside manager handing out towels.

Sameer Seth went the opposite route. Chemistry undergrad, IIM Kozhikode, Citibank, then a stint running marketing for Shalom in Delhi (the early-2000s lounge bar), then Cornell, then Bar Boulud and North End Grill in New York.

Hussain Shahzad cooked at the Trident in Bombay, got bored making “versions of tomato soup on every menu,” then on a night shift cold-emailed Eleven Madison Park’s info address asking for an internship. They wrote back saying no internships, but they’d consider him for a job. He flew to New York on a hastily-arranged visa, lied to his boss that his mom was sick, walked from his YMCA on 54th Street down to 23rd just to look at the building, and the next day got handed a 180-day dry-aged ribeye as a trade test. He’d never cooked beef in his life.

“When I sliced into it, it was the book definition of medium.”

He got the job. Within his first month at EMP he was crying in the walk-ins.

“They break you down to a point where they want you to unlearn and then learn.”

The real differentiator was the service

Everybody talks about the food. Vir’s argument is that what actually changed the game was hospitality — staff who were respectful without being obsequious, who understood the menu, who could explain it. In India in 2015, that was unusual.

Catering colleges had been training people for hotel jobs (Taj, ITC) for decades. Standalone restaurants didn’t really exist at scale, so the schools never solved for them. The result: restaurant briefings in India focused on whether your nails were trimmed and your uniform was pressed. In New York, briefings were 30-45 minute master classes where you tasted the day’s specials and the wines.

The team imported a system called Soigner — a four-slip communication chain so the bar, kitchen, server, and manager all know that Mr. Sanghvi prefers sparkling water and is allergic to gluten before he sits down. The first attempt failed. Yash put his foot down because the team was too green to handle four coordinated touchpoints. They eventually built it back, manually, with a triplicate KOT pad.

The other rule, set early: if a guest abuses staff, ask them to leave. Don’t take payment.

“Red line is abuse. And I feel we don’t do it enough.”

How Eggs Kejriwal happened

The Willingdon Club had served their version for years. A few old Parsis ate it. Bombay Canteen popularized it almost by accident. Their bunny chow used a hollowed-out brioche, leaving a pile of round bread tops as waste. Staff meals turned the tops into fried egg + cheese sandwiches. Sameer asked Thomas Zacharias to add a chutney. Then Arvind Kejriwal won the Delhi election and someone literally threw an egg at him during the campaign. The team named the dish, put it on the menu as a special, Vir wrote about it, it went viral, and now it appears on menus everywhere with various people taking credit.

It also explains why the brioche is round.

O Pedro and the value of not caring too much

Hussain’s first solo project was O Pedro, a Goan-inspired restaurant. He didn’t know Goan food. Floyd told him to spend two years researching it. They went to Portugal — Hussain worked in José Avillez’s kitchen — and came back with one egg tart and a lot of stories.

The thing that made O Pedro work was that Hussain had no emotional connection to the cuisine. He could question the whys. Goan chefs would have served you their grandmother’s cafreal and gotten defensive. Hussain put raw fish, buff tongue, and weird ceviches on the menu. By the second menu, he’d found his voice.

Hussain’s framework, which is worth pocketing:

“If you are extending the form of the dish, then you keep the flavor reminiscent. And if you’re stretching the flavor, then you keep the form recognizable. Because if you stretch them both, it becomes alien.”

Floyd and COVID

Vir came to Bombay Sweet Shop’s opening on the eve of the lockdown in March 2020, sat across from Floyd Cardoz, said goodbye. Floyd flew back to New York that night, caught COVID, didn’t survive. None of the team got infected.

Then came a strange social media campaign accusing Bombay Canteen of hiding Floyd’s illness, of putting customers at risk. The team was already devastated. The campaign faded as quickly as it appeared, but the wound stayed.

“It was soul-crushing, literally, to have people accuse us of doing something which we clearly didn’t.”

Bombay Sweet Shop happened in an airport

Yash was changing planes in Istanbul, on his way to help Floyd open Paowalla in New York. A vendor told him to try the baklava — not buy it, just try. He stood at the duty-free thinking about how Indian airports were busy selling Swiss chocolates “like we’d made them” while Indian sweets sat in grimy boxes at halwai shops, unchanged in form and flavor for generations.

The pitch back to Sameer: if we re-imagined Indian food in 2015, why not Indian sweets? Floyd’s rule before they could innovate: spend two years understanding tradition. Chef Girish (a French-trained pastry chef who’d grown up wanting to do an Iyengar bakery) joined them. They traveled India. Watched a halwai in Coimbatore make sweets while sitting silent for days before being allowed near the kadhai. Watched ghevar being made in Jaipur.

Bombay Sweet Shop opened in Byculla — chosen for the cheap rent and the fact that they wanted it to feel like a chocolate factory in Switzerland, somewhere you could watch a boondi laddu being made. It ran for ten days before COVID shut everything. They reopened in July 2020 as a delivery-only operation. Eleven people. Chef Girish washed dishes between batches.

Their first Raksha Bandhan they made a kaju roll covered in chocolate of different colors that, when boxed, looked like a rakhi. It sold out. By the time the boxes reached customers in monsoon humidity, the rakhi had melted into a flat chocolate puddle.

Why they finally took outside money

For a long time they refused growth capital. The logic: if you’re making single restaurants, money wants more money — “next, next, next” — and the incentives misalign. Sweet Shop changed the math. It’s now in six or seven Bombay locations, ships nationally, has 20 dark stores, and a real institutional business. Now growth capital makes sense.

The hope, half-joked, half-not: become India’s Shake Shack.

Papa’s

Papa’s is a 12-seat counter above Veronica’s in Bandra. Designed like Wes Anderson built a house in 1980s Bandra. 1.5 lakh clicks per minute when reservations open. 190 seats per month.

“Easier to get into an IIT.”

Hussain’s original menu was 17 courses, four and a half hours long. He ate the first full version with Vir while contractors put up wallpaper next to them and wanted to kill himself by the end. He admits the first eight months of the menu were a failure — decent food, not Papa’s-good. He had to “reel it back a couple of notches.”

The current menu cooks at Jude Bakery (an 80-year-old space with serious baking history) and includes a rabbit Kiev, a lamb pithivier inspired by his mother’s nihari, and a closer that references vanilla soft-serve and salted McDonald’s fries. It starts with desserts because his Bohri Muslim upbringing did. The food is playful because they let themselves not take the cuisine too seriously. That, Vir argues, is the whole secret.

Key Takeaways

Modern Indian food in 2014 meant two extremes — French-ified plating à la Vineet Bhatia, or molecular pyrotechnics à la Gaggan. The middle ground (home cooking, seasonal menus, Indian-only ingredients, small/large plate format) didn’t exist.
The hard part of running a restaurant in India is service, not food. Kitchens are getting better. Front-of-house keeps lagging because owners spend on celebrity designers and chefs but skip the GM.
Three-Michelin-star kitchens really do break you down on purpose. The point is to get you to unlearn what you know so they can re-teach you. Crying in the walk-in is part of the curriculum.
Indian catering colleges still optimize for hotel placements. They’re judged on the jobs graduates get, so they solve for the wrong incentive — standalones get short-changed.
Form vs flavor framework (Hussain Shahzad): stretch one or the other, never both. Familiar form + new flavor works. New form + familiar flavor works. Both new = alien.
Distance from a cuisine helps you innovate in it. Hussain didn’t know Goan food, so he could question it. A Goan chef would have defended his grandmother’s cafreal.
The Soigner system — four communication slips (server, bar, kitchen, manager) on every regular guest, covering allergies, preferences, history. Standard at Bar Boulud, novel in India.
Don’t tolerate verbal abuse from guests. Walk them out. Don’t take their money. The team will respect you more than they would the revenue.
Catering staffing is broken in India. Front-of-house is treated as ambience, not a discipline. Even good restaurants still take reservations in a paper book.
Single-restaurant businesses shouldn’t take growth capital. Investor incentives push for scale. Take it only when you’ve built something that genuinely scales (in their case, Bombay Sweet Shop’s product business).
Eggs Kejriwal exists because of brioche scrap. The round shape is leftover crust from their bunny chow bread.
Restaurants need a “honeymoon period” gameplan. First two months bring celebrity hype. Build training and consistency for what comes after.
Vegetarian menus are usually bad because no good chef is vegetarian — they can’t cook what they themselves want to eat.
The Indian sweet category hasn’t evolved in flavor or technique for decades. The form (kaju katli, ladoo, ghevar) is iconic; the inputs and methods are stuck. Massive opportunity for a “Bombay Sweet Shop” archetype.

Claude’s Take

This is a long, rambly conversation between three founders and an interviewer they all clearly know well, which means it’s full of inside-baseball laughs and skips a lot of the standard Q&A. That’s both its charm and its limitation. You won’t get a clean MBA case study. You will get a pretty honest picture of what it took to build the Hunger Inc group — the bad TripAdvisor reviews, the screaming guests, the “should we just go home” moments, the fact that Yash and Sameer used to fight openly in the early Bombay Canteen kitchen.

The most useful idea in the whole thing is Hussain’s form-vs-flavor rule. It generalizes way beyond food — it’s a clean way to think about any product that’s trying to push tradition without losing the audience. Stretch one axis at a time. The second-most useful idea is the bit about why service in India keeps failing: owners treat the front-of-house as decoration and the back-of-house as the product, when actually the front-of-house is what makes a guest come back. Both Sameer and Yash are unusually clear about this because they spent years working the floor.

The Floyd Cardoz section is the emotional center of the conversation. The COVID social-media pile-on against Bombay Canteen is one of those small, ugly Indian internet moments that didn’t get much of an obituary, and it’s worth hearing from the people on the receiving end of it.

Score is a 7. Not a 9 because the conversation meanders, the audio is a chase of three people interrupting each other, and you have to sit through a lot of name-dropping and Cornell flexing to extract the actual lessons. Not a 5 because the lessons, when they come, are the real thing — earned, specific, and rare in a country where most restaurant founders won’t tell you about the time their first review told them they’d be shut in six months.