Starting a new restaurant in Bangalore? Here’s what you should know…
Heard of the story in Ramayana where Shabri, an old poor woman in wild fed lord Ram with berries by tasting them first, if they were to be sweet. Yeah?
Well yes, we all can connect to the story where Bangalore feels like an exile and us wanting a Shabri to feed us with only the food that would be delicious and served with the same wholeheartedness. Here is how you can be the Shabri to the people going through this Bangalorean exile, considering our customers to be equivalent to god.
There is no sincerer love than the love of food. — George Bernard Shaw
People from different states and communities come here looking for better opportunities. Being titled Silicon Valley of India, Bangalore attracts huge IT crowd nevertheless foodies too. Currently, there are more than 50K restaurants registered on Zomato in Bangalore only. No doubt a restaurant business can look like a nice investment opportunity in Bangalore, but with a huge number of restaurants brings cut-throat competition among them.
Don’t worry, with proper planning and strategy one can pull off anything. We tried to provide answers to some of the crucial business questions that one can think of before stepping into the restaurant business.
The objective of this post is to find answers to below business questions:
1. Which locations to look for while opening new restaurants?
2. What factors affect the rating of your restaurants?
3. Pricing and dishes to go with?
4. Is an online presence really helpful?
Which locations to look for while opening new restaurants?
Let's look at the following statistics:
Here, are some most preferred locations for opening a restaurant in Bangalore. This may help in gaining insights about the popular locations and competition among these places.
Analyzing the above graphs, we can draw certain conclusions about the popular locations as well as the diversity of restaurants in locations in Bangalore i.e., While Koramangala 5th block is very popular and has a lot of restaurants, it does not have many restaurants with diverse cuisines. Places like Indiranagar and BTM, though they have a lesser number of restaurants, have greater diversity in terms of cuisines.
What factors affect the rating of your restaurants?
50% of the rate distribution lies between 3.4 and 4.0 with an average rating of 3.7. Rating of a restaurant plays major role in success. Nearly everyone checks out the rating before even planning to go out and I bet you also do the same :p. To run a successful restaurant business, an above-average Zomato rating is a must.
Here we can see that there is not much correlation between the rate of restaurants and other features
The above graph shows that as the number of votes increases, there is a chance that the overall rating of your restaurant will increase. We can clearly see that only a few restaurants cross the mark of 2k for two people and it seems like a fair price for two people. The majority of restaurants serve two people for approximately 1k and for starting a new restaurant, 1k is surely a good price while keeping in mind good profit margins.
Pricing and dishes to go with?
We can clearly see only a few restaurants cross the mark of 2k for two people and it seems like a fair price for two people. The majority of restaurants serve two people for approximately 1k and for starting a new restaurant, 1k is surely a good price while keeping in mind good profit margins. The price of the dishes and the price overall must be justified by the restaurant. People wouldn’t mind paying a little more if the place is really nice and so is the food.
This shows the kind of food that the people of Bangalore like to eat and what crowds a new restaurant serving these foods can expect. With such a large number of youth crowd in Bangalore, it comes with no surprise that fast foods i.e. Pasta, Burgers, Cocktails and Pizza top the chart of the most liked dishes. Fast Food or a Cafe is a win here.
Is an online presence really helpful?
Having an online order helps a new restaurant very much. A lot of the people in Bangalore prefer ordering home and not going out to eat. Nearly 60% of restaurants offer an online ordering facility. It increases the chances of reaching a broader audience in less time.
Restaurants which provide online order facility seem to have a better rating than the restaurants which don’t. As we have already found that better rating comes with more number of votes, one can increase restaurants votes by providing online ordering facility to reach a broader audience and serve well.
Conclusion
We based our analysis on keeping the restaurant business in mind. We tried to figure out answers to some of the common queries regarding opening a new restaurant.
- We concluded that BTM, Koramangala, and Hsr are good places to start a restaurant. Whitefield has the most number of unique restaurants and can be comparatively cheap compared to other locations. Koramangala, Indiranagar, and BTM are the most popular locations among foodies.
- A large number of votes ensures a better rating and a Thousand Rupees for 2 people is good to go price.
- Bangaloreans love fast food.
- Providing an online ordering service can boost your chances of a good start.
Starting a new business takes a lot of courage, hard work, and dedication. I wish you all the best if you are planning to enter this field and hope I have been of any help.
Please do provide your feedback in comments and also let us know if you would prefer a sentiment analysis on the restaurant reviews.
For technical analysis done for the finding, you can visit the jupyter notebook on Kaggle and Github.
