The restaurateur wouldn't have imagined that he would mark 20 years in F&B by devising a playbook from scratch. But he's weathered the Covid storm and is looking set to return to his growth trajectory
Riyaaz Amlani, CEO and MD of Impresario Handmade Restaurants, at Carter Road Social; Image: Neha Mithbawker
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What has seen Amlani not just through the pandemic, but also a 20-year rollercoaster in the thin-margin, risky F&B industry is his pliability and his ability to read situations well. He was entrepreneurially-wired since a kid—“I once got thrown out of school for trying to sell marbles to kids”—and started off at 16, selling shoes from a 100 sq ft shop in central Mumbai’s Sion. He shut it after six years, almost as a knee-jerk reaction after haggling with a customer for an hour over a 50 paise discount. He went off to the US and returned with a degree in entertainment management. While setting up a go-karting track for the Hiranandani group in Powai, he noticed that irrespective of whether visitors rode the cars, everyone grabbed the stale sandwiches and the machine-made coffee at the F&B console. “It told me food is central to human interactions,” he says. In almost a Eureka moment, he gathered two of his friends (one of them, Kiran Salaskar, is part of the promoter group of Impresario) and started Mocha on the porch of Berry’s, a restaurant that his father used to run. Mocha began to serve 32 varieties of coffee and sheesha, a novelty factor that drew diners in hordes. “We did so well that my father asked us to run the entire restaurant,” he laughs. Mocha, a 40-cover restaurant doing 300 covers in rotation, introduced Mumbai to the concept of all-day dining, a paradigm shift from lunch-and-dinner-only restaurants. “At that point, you could do that only at 5-stars or Udupi restaurants,” says Amlani. But its average per cheque (APC) was low at Rs 150 and, in 2008, when the then Mumbai mayor started a campaign against hookahs, Mocha began to lose its mojo.It was around the same time Amlani was offered a beachfront property in Chowpatty, but he figured that with the sun beating down on the west-facing property during the day, he could only have a limited window in the evening to make hay. The only way to monetise the property would be through a fine-dining restaurant that would bring in high APCs. In 2008, Amlani onboarded his first external investor, Deepak Shahdadpuri, who then led Beacon India Private Equity Fund, to build Impresario beyond Mocha.****