New Sardar owner V. N. Prabhu says the restaurant will shut shop by the end of the year. Photo: Sohrab Nicholson.
We’ve raved about New Sardar’s excellent sandwiches and their “batsal”. Now we recommend that if you plan to eat there, it’s best you go sooner rather than later. The building it’s located in is slated to undergo redevelopment by the end of this year, and owner V. N. Prabhu has decided not to reopen it after that. It’s been the family business for 80 years now, but lately he’s been finding it very hard to sustain it. In the last few months, regulars at New Sardar have already seen the symptoms. It has become a modified QSR (quick service restaurant). Twenty of the service staff have been let go. The food is as delicious as always, but it’s served on disposable plates.
New Sardar is not the only one. Grade II and Grade III restaurants (the grades depend on quality of service, hygiene, and licence fees) across the city are endangered. These are not just Irani cafes, many of which have garnered attention for shutting shop in recent years. According to one Sanitary Officer who wishes to remain anonymous, in A Ward alone (that includes Navy Nagar, Colaba, Cuffe Parade, Marine Drive and Fort), 22 restaurants have surrendered their licences in the last month. These include Rasraj Juice Centre in Fort, Sanman and Suruchi in New Marine Lines, and Kamat’s on D. N. Road.
Some of these are not so great, but many of them are important to the neighbourhoods they occupy. These are places where Rs7,000 will buy you three meals every day for a year. Many of them are iconic eateries that are over half a century old, even if they haven’t got the press that Britannia has. They feed the working population around them, and often serve community-specific, traditional foods that work for their clientele. That formula clearly doesn’t work very well any more.
I spoke with the owners of three restaurants that have crossed the 60-year mark. They don’t expect their establishments to last more than a couple of years from now. Here’s why:
SHORTAGE OF STAFF
This does not bode well for these eateries. Sunil Saigal, owner of Punjab Moti Halwai on Cawasji Patel Street in Fort, says that in February, he had 23 staff members; now, he has only 11. Many migrant workers from the northern states went home for Holi and never came back. The large, airy restaurant was established in 1956 and is still famous for its samosas and lassi, so everyone should go try them while it’s still around.
Nobody wants to work in Grade II or III restaurant out of choice. “A dishwasher’s job has a bigger stigma attached to it than a watchman’s,” says Saigal. Since these restaurants are so reasonably priced, they pay relatively low salaries. The older staff sticks around because of job security, but it’s hard to find young, cheap labour. “Places that serve traditional food need bigger kitchens and knowledgeable staff,” says Prabhu. “The work for our ussal starts one day in advance because we grind our own masalas. Even getting the right colour in the masala for dosa is an art. No fresh blood is coming into this sort of restaurant. If it continues like this, traditional food will go the way of the burger (McDonald’s). They require workers, we require artists.”
COSTS AND GOVERNMENT LEVIES
Not just food costs (which have certainly risen alarmingly), even rising electricity bills, LPG prices, and government levies like VAT and service tax are eating into the profits of these low-cost restaurants. “VAT was introduced to replace octroi,” says Kamlakar Shenoy, who owns Sadguru, a restaurant opposite Sandhurst Road railway station, that was opened in 1930 and serves primarily Maharashtrian and Udupi snacks. “Octroi has stayed, VAT has been expanded to cover more categories and the rate has been increased, and now the government is introducing an even more draconian tax called LBT; it’s the government that is creating inflation.” Shenoy says that a lot of these levies don’t make any sense. “Why should I pay service tax on my total revenue when only 20 per cent of the seats at Sadguru are in a windowless air-conditioned section?” he asks. “Why is it considered a luxury here when all the government offices are air-conditioned with our tax money? If the government is going to take 25 per cent of my income in various levies, what am I going to earn?” These taxes show up at the bottom of the bill in the posher places, but you never see them on the receipt at places such as these (though it does not mean that they aren’t already included in the still-affordable menu prices).
COMPETITION AND CUSTOMERS
The city’s restaurant scene is growing. It’s sometimes hard to pick just two restaurants to review each week. And pretty much everyone from hawkers to the new takeaway place down the road is competition for the old places, especially since they don’t offer anything remotely trendy. “If you’re serving Italian or Chinese food, you can prepare it with ready sauces and spice mixes, charge Rs120 to Rs150 a dish, and people will pay for it,” says Prabhu. “It’s not like I can charge those rates here for dosa and sandwich.”
Saigal says that staff from these restaurants leave and start their own hawker’s stalls, serving the same food, but at very low prices, because they don’t have any overheads. Until a few years ago, Punjab Moti Halwai would generate 500 receipts a day. These days, the dining hall often has only a dozen people at any given time.
PROPERTY ISSUES
As in the case of New Sardar, a lot of these restaurants occupy large spaces in areas of the city that have become very attractive to developers, who are then willing to pay the restaurant owners to leave the premises. The offer is tempting. The migrant labour that made up their initial business has all but disappeared, there are not enough footfalls any more, and overheads are only increasing. It makes sense, as owner or tenant, to take a large stash of cash, put it in the bank, and put your feet up, instead of going through the increasingly tedious grind of running a simple, moderately priced, low-profit restaurant.
The building that Punjab Moti Halwai is situated in has been bought by a new owner who is working with Saigal to find new occupants. From the interest they’ve garnered, it’s evidently the sort of space that will work well for banks. “The day I get my price, ” he says, “I’m going to call it a day.”
Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and the restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.