A Decade-Long Gastronomic Ode To Burma

Source: NDTV Profit
Author: Priya Ramani

How does a Burmese restaurant -- one that's vegetarian and doesn't serve alcohol -- grow from one south Mumbai outlet with a 20-day waiting list to a Rs 100 crore business, with 11 thriving restaurants and a cloud kitchen in six cities (eight if you count NCR as three cities) in a decade? We are more acquainted with the popular cuisines of Myanmar's (as Burma is now called) neighbours, China and Thailand. Even Goa's legendary Burmese restaurant, Bomras, which is ranked number 2 on Conde Nast Traveller's best restaurants of 2023 list, hedges its Burmese menu with pan Asian offerings.

Burma Burma co-founder Ankit Gupta occasionally can't believe how cheerfully his clients embraced the tea salad he grew up eating. Coincidentally, I'm speaking to him exactly 10 years to the day he and his childhood buddy and co-founder Chirag Chhajer opened their first Kala Ghoda branch. Chhajer says their Hyderabad restaurant has the highest sales, surprising as Telangana is ground zero of India's meat eaters. I tried to decode some success secrets.

Every successful business usually has a dil ka connection and this one is no different. Like many business families, Gupta's mother's family immigrated to Burma in the 1910s under the British dispensation. By the time Japan attacked Burma in 1942, sentiment against the 'kalas' had grown. As the British retreated from the attack, half a million Indians exited Burma to return to their motherland. By the 1960s, the military junta had driven out most Indians. Gupta's family returned in 1973. His mother was 22 and couldn't speak Hindi or English. As a child, Gupta's lunchbox often contained Burmese dishes his mother made. The first inkling Gupta had that we could appreciate Burmese cuisine was the feedback from his school friends -- they loved his lunches.

In 2010, when military rule was replaced by a military-backed civilian government, Burma opened its doors to outsiders, and Gupta, along with his friend and now head chef Ansab Khan, visited the country. It was a curious trip, he recalls. "SIM cards cost Rs 35,000 and nobody accepted dollar bills that were folded." Still, Gupta, a trained hospitality professional whose father and grandfather ran the multi-cuisine Garden Treat restaurant and bar in Mumbai's Santa Cruz for 40 years, loved the flavours of the country where his mother had spent two decades, and began thinking seriously about a restaurant. "I fell in love," he says. "The food was beyond what my mother used to cook."