My learnings from the Bay Area Indian food scene

An introspect into the dark, or maybe grey, side of Bay Area Indian Restaurants

Being an Indian by ethnicity it is fairly obvious that Indian cuisine is my favorite food. Living in Bay Area has this awesome perk of having a great number and variety of Indian restaurants that caters to my taste. With a location having such diversity, culture and Indians,an Indian restaurant is a very lucrative business to run. And as a result, Bay Area has more than 100 restaurants that caters to Indian taste buds.

Playing by the standard restaurant business playbook, where quality, customer service and engagement contribute as the chief factor for any successful food business, what I am going to do here is express some of my observations and experiences with Indian restaurants in Silicon Valley. I am not going to directly name these places, for their good or bad, as this is not a writeup to endorse or dissuade any business. All the views expressed here are based on my ‘somewhat’ attempt to understand the semantics of owning and running (not necessarily) an Indian restaurant.I have had and anyone can have similar experiences in other non-Indian restaurants too but I choose to base my post on Indian restaurants because I visit them a lot.

So why do you eat out? because you do not have time to cook, you want to eat something that ‘others’ can cook or cook better, want to break the monotony of home cooked meals, have a good and enjoyable time with friends and family out of house or maybe simply put you just cannot cook. With such underlying problems to solve, the food and restaurant industry have a sweet spot which makes it a hell of great business in USA with a large number of singles population. My 2+ years of experience with the Bay Area Indian food scene have shown me the eagle’s eye view of entire range of their service spectrum.

Staring an Indian (or any) restaurant can be paralleled with starting a startup. You start low, keep a low-to-often-no profit margin and focus on creating a dent in the market, if not winning. With Indian restaurants, its pretty much same with one caveat that the concept of no-profit margin is non existent. Attributing to high operational costs and low external investments, unlike early startups, the restaurant business need to have profits however little they be. Nonetheless, like startup, they start with focus on quality and customer. The free or freemium model, often present in startups doesn't apply here and is often accommodated via low prices. Now as the company grows and becomes successful/profitable, they “scale” to keep up with market providing the same quality and services that made them popular. This is done by reinvesting the profits on the company by hiring more people to scale the operations. This is where I see a lot of Bay Area Indian restaurants diverging. This famous Mary Ave restaurant in Sunnyvale failed me here. They were/are clearly one of the big restaurants now but I still see them not investing in getting more staff and busboys. The food, once awesome, now just tastes normal like mayraids of other ones and on any weekend the quality of service is very very poor. I had to wait for getting on the list for 20 mins because the “front desk” was multitasking taking orders, cleaning dishes and hopefully not cooking. I had a similar experience with another Santa Clara restaurant near Bowers and El Camino.

The other aspect I often see is on return orders. I understand the waits and confusions on a busy day but if my order comes in wrong, it needs to be remedied. This once happened to me at another ever-crowded Indian place near Handerson and El Camino in Sunnyvale. The waiter kept looking into my eyes as if I ‘had’ to eat the food. He reminded me of the proverbial Indian haggler from Russel Peter’s comedy. One of my friends caved in and well it worked for them.Just because I said I don’t want it, I was given a cold stare and my theory is that my orders were deliberately late then.

When it comes to quality and presentation, the low end restaurants falls in this part of the spectrum. Now their motto is you will get good cheap food. Cheap restaurants , specially a couple on South Main in Milpitas, are always crowded not because of the ambience but their prices. They are good eats for the money they charge but with the perennial intention to make profits. I have been served soup in steel bowls as well as shared tables because of the lack of space. Well to be fair I knew what I was getting into but a steel bowl and glass somehow gives me an impression of questionable hygiene. And do not dare looking into their kitchen. Just remember, the food is low priced. Often in one of these restaurants, I see the cashier disappearing into kitchen and popping in and out. I just hope he is not also cooking by looking at his curvy hair.

There are more “good” restaurants than “bad” ones I guess but I mention about these bad experiences because a bad service or meal takes the joy out of the experience that I expected while getting inside the restaurant. For the numerous good experiences I had, I remember very little because I spent time in actually enjoying the food rather than analyzing the workings of the restauranteurs during my meal and later a postmortem writeup!

One of the restaurants at Hollenbeck and El Camino in Sunnyvale claims to have a coveted dish of mine Raj Kachori but to my disappointment its just a Dahi Papdi served differently. Now this has nothing to do with it being their fault but it brings an important point in this discussion. I went to that place reading the online reviews on yelp. Now in Bay Area, any decent restaurant I see has at least 100+ reviews. This is hugely helpful in deciding on a new place. Unfortunately I see marginally less reviews for Indian places as compared to other ethnic cuisines like Thai, Vietnamese et al. Are we less in number? Are we eating out less? No and No. Its probably the laziness after a good meal or the distracted frustration after a bad meal that is keeping up away from writing this review. In this age, Yelp and Zagat reviews make a huge difference and can be our answer to the tyranny and idiosyncrasies of bad services we come across. You can call this starting something akin Non Cooperation Movement in the food industry. Just because they can stand to loose a couple of customers , who do not cave into their non professional behavior, doesn’t mean that this should not be voiced. Just like you want your opinion on Obama administration, Immigration Reform Act, Affordable Health Care Act or NaMo Revolution to be heard, why not rat out (or yelp out) these bad services or applaud their effort for giving you a good experience. Use something trivial like a pen-and-paper or an app like Evernote Food to record your thoughts and rate these Indian restaurants for building a better connected community of people with a taste bud for curry :)

Food for thought?