This month we look at our friendly neighbourhood café, Fat Jar in Kailash Colony New Delhi, that has stood the test of time, both in taste and quality. Run by Deepak Maira, this café opened for business in early 2018. A modern European all-day restaurant that offers wholesome servings of Italian, Mediterranean and a dash of popular Indian on its menu. The dining experience and menu have evolved, and only gotten better with time.
“It was a series of unplanned events that got me to open Fat Jar and discover a hidden passion for the restaurant business. When people from school and college got to know of my new venture and came to try the place, they all told me this is what I always wanted to do. I was upset with a lot of them saying, why didn’t you tell me this earlier?” says Maira. While his foray into F&B was not by design, the role of a restaurateur came very naturally to him.
The restaurant is warm and inviting with a calm, easy vibe. It is casual and undemanding and allows for free-flowing conversation with some really good food to boast of. “One of the conditions of why the space actually got taken by me is that we didn’t want a place that was extremely busy or had too many people coming and going considering we live on the same premises. So today a lot of people come here to access a quiet place and they go back feeling peaceful and happy.” The colours, the greenery and the design are conducive to creating this vibe. Maira wants his guests to be “relaxed here and go home happy”. Towards this he worked on the quality of air, the smell in the place, the ambient music and consciously reducing echo and noise, so guests can actually talk and sit at leisure. Another element of the design that Maira was conscious of was creating as much visibility and transparency as possible in terms of the kitchen and operations. “There’s no area of the restaurant that is off limits to customers. It leads to more discipline with the team as well”.
He elaborates that the success of a restaurant is dependent on footfall, but not necessarily dependent on having a room full of people all the time. Which is what then dictated that they are not only a lunch and dinner place but needed to be open all day. They then added the word ‘café’ in the name rather than saying restaurant. “We want our guests to come every day!” says Maira.
Coming to the food and menu, it’s a collection of his favourites and the food he likes to eat. At the onset, Fat Jar focused on Italian and Mediterranean food. The idea was to perfect this, get the consistency and taste set and then see what next. It was an approach which evolved the restaurant more organically. “It worked initially, in a manner of speaking, we broke even multiple times over the first two years. We would open for one shift and then say, okay, this is the revenue and this is the expense we broke even now let’s open for longer”.
Their charitable initiative to provide basic food for migrant labourers and others in need during Covid, inadvertently influenced their menu in the months that followed. “We were then doing 500 meals a day for the poor at Rs16 per meal. And that helped pay for the electricity, helped put food in front of all the team. But the interesting thing that came out of that was once we started playing with Indian food, we found many customers requesting for more! We also got into delivery of Indian food for our customers. To our surprise when they got back to the restaurant, some of them demanded that they be served Indian! And so now we have two platters, an Indian non vegetarian platter and Indian vegetarian platter on the menu that have found their own loyal audience”!
His passion and desire for quality comes through clearly when it comes to sourcing the right ingredients. “We sourced coffee from an estate in Yercaud, a hill station in Tamil Nadu. It has the right taste of bitterness you want from coffee and great aroma. We were looking for good quality tomatoes, and we found good quality tomatoes growing in Gujarat. We have a vegetable vendor who is growing chemical free vegetables in Palampur, so he started delivering vegetables to us. We were getting pearl barley from the east in Calcutta. And so, we spent a lot of time trying to source the right ingredients; good imported cheese and meats. And as I told you, it’s food I like to eat”.
Apart from getting the best ingredients, another element for success is to get the process automated so that the production of the food is consistent. “It does not change from season to season or chef to chef”, says Maira. It is critical to make sure that there is consistency.
“So good ingredients, how do you showcase the ingredients? Literally put them out there and say, this is what we use.” This led to a small market place within the restaurant. They also sell their artisanal ingredients which allows you to take back home a part of the Fat Jar experience. They also make their own pasta! It’s fresh and unprocessed and up for sale. We highly recommend trying that as well!
So, what kind of audience does this fairly quaint friendly café cater to really? Maira explains that over the past 6+ years, the audience has evolved. They began with a focus on young children and even designed a play area and special child friendly seating. That was a key target audience and there they put into place a kids’ menu. They have always been focused on building the right clients. It worked very well pre-Covid, “the recall amongst children was very high and they were very sticky customers. So, by default moms came, the family unit came, the bigger family unit came and so on”.
But then Covid hit and for all these kids, it became acceptable to spend all day in front of a screen and the priorities changed. So, once the pandemic ended, the biggest growth market was two people looking for a place to go to in the age bracket of about 24-45yrs and this became our focus area. “And we suddenly offered friends and couples a place where they could be in their little cocoon and spend quality time with each other. So that has stayed with us here today”, says Maira. These are today the loyal customers who then further promote the place.
“Pre-pandemic about 15 to 20% of our business used to come out of the tourists who would live in the hotels close by. That dropped to zero. Tripadvisor was a big platform for us to promote ourselves because it attracted these guys. Hopefully it picks up again. Last season was not too bad. This season will become better. About half of our business used to be this family group oriented, hinging on kids. And then the last one third was younger people who tried the place out and wanted to do new things”.
The profile now is almost 60% of businesses from that 25 to 60 age group and the new cohort of kids who were born during the pandemic are now beginning to enter that loyal customer segment. And what happened in 2018 is beginning to happen now.
So, what next for them? Get ready to visit Fat Jar on MG Road early 2025.
