Pankaj Gupta was always inclined towards Amritsari vegetarian cuisine and never quite understood why people in Mumbai always equated Punjabi food with only non-vegetarian delicacies such as Chicken Tikka Masala. “Home-cooked Punjabi food is more vegetarian than we think,” he shared. Determined even without a godfather in the F&B industry, he started Oye Kake in 2011 to fill the void of a proper regional Punjabi food chain in Mumbai. It was a time of word-of-mouth marketing back then. Taftoon and Cirqa followed. Elevating home-cooked dishes across North India, restaurateur-founder Pankaj Gupta discusses how Cirqa, Taftoon, and Oye Kake shadow his quest to uphold Indian cuisines.

What was the challenge you faced as a first-gen restaurateur?

The first challenge was being an outsider in this exhaustive industry and the second was Mumbai’s unorganized labour force. Thirdly, inefficient logistics is a concern because we never know how and in which kind of vehicle is the food being travelled in. Temperature control is also an issue. Access to ingredients and fluctuation of prices of raw materials cause hurdles. In terms of opportunities, Mumbai being the financial capital of India provides a massive pie in domestic business. Yet, it is not even 5% of the F&B business of Manhattan and London.

Tell us about your growth trajectory of Oye Kake and Taftoon. Which markets are you catering to and how are they growing in terms of retail presence and business?

On a graph, all my brands have shown an increasingly linear growth trend. Oye Kake completes 13 years in business now and Taftoon is six years old too. I do restaurants that stand the test of time and hence, I approach a linear trend. I don’t think that Indian food was given its due recognition in the global food palette by 2015. There has always been a regional and a commercial aspect to Indian food. Be it the home-cooked moong daal, alu bhindi, daab chingri from Kolkata, or hari saag from Kashmir, such Indian food set examples of blending spices beautifully.

I also wanted to dispel the myth of North Indian food being only Punjabi, as it’s so much more. There are so many cuisines from Kashmiri to the entire north-east belt. So, we focused on the GT Road that starts from Kabul, Afghanistan and ends in Chittagong, Bangladesh. Kashmiri, Bengali, Awadhi and Afghani cuisine were the main touch points along that culinary route. That’s how Taftoon happened in 2017.  I have a Bengali, Awadhi, and a Kashmiri master chef for Taftoon. With the north Indian belt covered, I’m now interested in the vast dietary delights of South India.

How well is Mumbai's appetite for vegetarian Punjabi food currently and what are your plans to spice up the menu for Oye Kake in the future?

We absolutely disrupted the vegetarian restaurant scene and brought in the kulcha-chhole culture with a concise menu. We brought in social cooking that hasn’t been replicated anywhere in Mumbai. We are very close on signing a 10-outlet deal on Oye Kake over the next 2 years across Pune, Mumbai, Gujarat, and Bangalore. We are making Oye Kake’s menu concise, simple and scalable. Within the last couple of years, we have spent a lot of time on setting stringent SOPs.

How different is Cirqa from your past projects?

I am an alcohol enthusiast and travel a lot. It took six years to materialize Cirqa. Our team has been working for at least 18 months on this concept. Cirqa is an ode to what Mumbai has seen so far, where several nationalities thrived and left Mumbai with their unique food culture. This place functions on no-rule cooking and witnesses the overlap of multiple culinary schools of thought.

Primarily, Cirqa is a cocktail bar with cocktail done very differently. It’s about aging, fermenting, resting, temperature, mixing and proper clarification of cocktails. We wanted to create tasty cocktails and built this space where time strips away. You can eat and drink here with absolutely no need to hop to another place. It’s a two-storeyed building with the ground floor resembling modern, classic Mumbai. Upstairs is a bar titled 1960, an ode to Bombay in a year when the city became the capital of Maharashtra. So, with CIrqa, it’s simple food done well with elevated cooking.

What are your future plans?

Now, we’ve bundled three brands into the company. Next up is the plan to take Taftoon and Oye Kake outside Mumbai, in Pune and Bangalore. Cirqa will be a one-city, one-outlet property with Delhi being its next destination.