Food

What It's Like to Run a Small Restaurant in India Amid the Pandemic

“When you win, you win exhausted from working 14-hour shifts and perpetually smelling like Schezwan sauce. When you lose, you dig into your savings to keep it afloat and seriously consider turning it into a grocery shop.”
pot belly restaurant india
Empty tables, a handful of home delivery orders, mounting rents and bills plague thousands of India's small restaurants. Photo courtesy of Pot Belly

Every evening, my partner comes home, takes off his mask, and answers a question I’m too afraid to ask.

“How many orders today?”

In the middle of June, just after restaurants in India were given the go-ahead to open post lockdown, he would answer with one hand. One day, we had as little as two orders.

Two.

We spent the restaurant’s one-year anniversary at home, pretending it wasn’t.

In 2018, my partner quit his job as a research psychologist to start a hole-in-the-wall desi Chinese takeaway joint we called Pot Belly, in Secunderabad in the Indian state of Telangana. It served the kind of desi Chinese food we both loved eating. We had a small team of chefs from Nepal, Assam and Darjeeling, who made momos exactly the way they had them while they were growing up. It was a menu of just eight items of pure comfort food, the kind you crave while binge-watching Netflix or on a bad day at work.

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People loved it too. It got so popular that my partner, along with his parents, plunged a sizeable chunk of their life savings into expanding Pot Belly into a 40-seater restaurant with a full-fledged menu. I would drop by post work and chat with customers or just help out at the cash counter sometimes but my main job was to anchor our income with my freelance writing work.

The restaurant held the promise of a life lived on our own terms, the joy of developing recipes together, setting our own hours and paying off in what’s now looking like a very long run.

Nobody expected us to break even within the first year. But we did in six months, in December 2019.

But come January and even though COVID-19 was no more than a whisper in the news, the orders began to drop drastically. Customer paranoia was peaking slowly, though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states that the risk of getting COVID-19 from food, treated drinking water, or food packaging is very low.

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The remaining kitchen staff at Pot Belly catch a break while waiting for orders to come in.

Food businesses are among the toughest to run, with long hours, wafer-thin margins and sometimes, very entitled customers.

When you win, you win exhausted from working 14-hour shifts and perpetually smelling like Schezwan sauce. When you lose, like in the pandemic now, you dig into your savings to keep it afloat and seriously consider turning it into a grocery shop.

Plus, with a fatal, poorly-understood, invisible bug on the loose, we couldn’t escape an ethical dilemma: Should we stay open and place everyone’s lives at risk? Or close and leave our employees, many of whom are migrants, in the lurch?

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The lockdown made us close for a few months, but we kept everyone on at reduced pay. Two of our staff left for their hometowns, stating that they did not feel safe from the virus in the city. After the India-China border standoff, one customer turned up telling us that we shouldn’t be doing Chinese food. “Is there no other cuisine?” he barked. “You guys should really switch to Italian or something.”

We are not the only ones confused about how to weigh the months we’ve put into a restaurant against our rapidly dwindling bank balance.

For 30 years, Sanjay Manmohan has run Jus Gokool, a multicuisine restaurant in the neighbourhood of Marredpally in Hyderabad. Jus Gokool has seen political unrest, several citywide bandhs (closures) and now a pandemic.

“I’ve never shut my kitchen once over these 30 years,” he tells me over the phone. “Even if the shutters were closed, I’d be doing deliveries.”

Overheads, like electricity, salaries and rent, are so high at restaurants, he says if he hadn’t owned part of the compound Jus Gokool is situated on, he’d have shut down long ago. From a staff of 30-odd people, he’s now down to eight, serving a heavily whittled down menu.

Akif Ahmad, who runs Rampur Kitchen in Delhi’s New Friends Colony, hasn’t opened even though restaurants have been allowed to operate since June 8. “I didn’t want to take a chance on the safety of my customers and staff,” he says. In any case, prior to the lockdown, his sales seemed to fall off a cliff. “In the period of a week, customers gradually stopped coming, and we were getting very few orders. I saw weekly revenue drop to about 10 percent of the usual.” Ahmad is in talks with his landlord to negotiate rent over the next couple of months. “I’ve been maintaining my mental health by trying to follow a routine daily. I try to go for runs to blow off steam,” he says.

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The restaurant industry is notoriously bad for mental health and the financial struggle during the pandemic is making things worse.

Back in our neighbourhood, some rival Chinese restaurants, at the mercy of loans and financial difficulties, have closed. Every other day, a restaurant in my neighbourhood closes and a to-let sign is put up. One evening, we drove past a couple standing outside a bakery, holding each other in tears as men (presumably bailiffs) tore down the hoardings of their business.

A few weeks ago, the owner of a bar and restaurant, who used to lift weights with my husband, called him up in tears to tell him about his business partner, who had died by suicide. Financial strife was getting to them, they didn’t have the funds to renew their liquor license, and life was getting unbearable. Days later, he went the same way.

We’ve managed to hold on till now thanks to my income and a great therapist, but we worry constantly about what the future will bring.

The future of dining, they say, is socially distanced, and the restaurants that survive will be the ones that come up with creative solutions like meal kits and centre their customers’ safety.

“But I’m not sure how that is going to work,” says Malaysian citizen Zahbia Siraj, who moved to Hyderabad to be in the food business. In January, after two years of being a home chef, she started Truly Asian, a cloud kitchen serving South East Asian and desi Chinese food. “I mean, the entire dining experience is lost… you come to enjoy the ambience and not to be covered up in ten things.” Many others VICE spoke to expressed the same doubts.

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The safety procedures alone are expensive to implement. The cost of hygiene certification, hand sanitisers, thermometers, masks, and UV sanitisation equipment at Pot Belly came up to about Rs 45,000 ($600), which is not affordable for many small restaurants at the moment. Amidst sky-high electricity bills all over the country, it’s hard to make an investment in something you’re not sure is going to pay off. Many restaurant owners VICE spoke to said they wouldn’t be implementing these measures unless they were legally mandated by the government.

We dug deep into our reserves and invested in them, anyway. Since incorporating these measures, we’ve had good days, where we go over 10 orders. But we’re not even close enough to breaking even.

We don’t know if we will survive past December, and to make it till then will require large flushes of cash.

I count us lucky as we have an alternate source of income, and the caste privilege and wherewithal to withstand a bit of financial duress. However, every to-let sign we see on what used to be a restaurant, feels like a bullet grazing past and missing us by inches.

Just as we’ve accepted that at some point, one of us might contract the coronavirus, we’ve also accepted that one day, the bullet might come for us. Till then, we’re just taking it one order at a time.

Follow Pratika on Twitter.