Success on a platter

Aparajita Gupta, TNN | Mar 23, 2011, 05.27am IST

 In1991, he started a 32-seater restaurant called Only Fish in Mumbai. He didn't have much money to spend, so the restaurant did not even have a toilet. He gave his wife Rs 50,000 to do the interiors. She bought some terracotta showpieces from Kolkata to decorate the place. 

To his surprise, Only Fish soon became a favourite of the glitterati, thanks to the superb food and the interiors done by his wife. "In no time, stars like Jaya Bachchan,Anupam Kher and Ashish Vidyarthi started coming to our restaurant," says Anjan Chatterjee,who now owns some of India's best-known restaurant chains, including Mainland China, Oh! Calcutta, Machaan, Sigree and Flame & Grill.

The success of Only Fish, which later transformed into Oh! Calcutta, persuaded Chatterjee to begin a speciality restaurants business. He had done a three-year diploma course in hotel management from the Indian Institute of Hotel Management, Taratalla (Kolkata). He teamed up with three of his batchmates—Indranil Chatterjee, Biswajit Mukherjee and Indranil Palit—for the venture.

The idea was to build speciality restaurants and not to mix any cuisine with another. "Since my childhood I had gone out to eat in Tangra (China town in Kolkata). But I never could find a standalone Chinese restaurant that could offer a duck, a broccoli or real Chinese sauces, like Tangra did. There was a lack of focused cuisine.We saw an opportunity there." Thus was born Mainland China in 1995 in Sakinaka, Mumbai. Mainland China quickly became the flagship chain of Chatterjee's company Speciality Restaurants and is today perhaps the largest chain of fine dining Chinese restaurants in the country with 30 outlets.

The USP of the company was to provide "five star food and service at non-five star prices". Chatterjee invested a lot in the back end—the kitchen. "For long-term operations one cannot have a small kitchen. So we have large kitchens.We check our food through internal microbiological tests. We have never compromised on quality," he says.

Chatterjee, now 52, says he learnt the art of hospitality from his father. "I was influenced by the way my father and other family members welcomed guests at home." And he learnt the art of good cooking from his inlaws. They were originally from Sylhet in East Bengal (now Bangladesh), a place well known for the uniqueness of their cooking.

Chatterjee comes from a family that's not even remotely associated with business. "Ours is a family of research scientists. Mostly people with doctorates and post doctorates." His father was an entomologist associated with the Indian Agricultural Research Institute.

Though born in Kolkata, Chatterjee was constantly on the move as a child as his father had a transferable job. He completed his graduation from Utkal University in physiology. But Chatterjee wanted to do something different. "In the early 1980s, catering was not considered a respectable profession.

People at home were not at all encouraging. But I have tremendous conviction in whatever I want to do." With that, he joined the hotel management course. He was picked up by the Taj Group from the campus and started working in Mumbai as a management trainee. But that wasn't enough for Chatterjee. He did an evening course in marketing, and then went on to join Ananda Bazar Partika's advertising department where he did space marketing.

In 1985, he set up his own advertising agency in Mumbai called Situations Advertising and Marketing Services, which is now a Rs 200-crore company with clients like Jyothy Laboratories, Cello pens,Everest Masala and Wipro Consumer Care's Yardley brand. The money from this business, combined with his interest in food and expertise in hotel management, persuaded him to set up Only Fish, and led him into a line that he is now far better known for.

His wife, Suchhanda (Minu), has been a big support; she plans the master designs of his restaurants' interiors. He has also brought in unique touches to his services. "When I turned 40, I realized the need of a pair of reading glasses and I also found that people some times forget to carry it. So I started keeping a box full of reading glasses of all powers in my restaurants." He also found that elderly people often shiver when eating in air-conditioned rooms. "I told myself, if aircrafts can keep shawls,why can't we. So we have shawls in restaurants."

Such attention to detail has worked wonders with diners.