Bharat is a friend from school days and his restaurant is one of the best in
Kolkata.
The website is www.redhotchillipepper.in
Regards
Chittaranjan
Chef and friends try red-hot recipe to cook up success
Starting out with Rs1.5 lakh each, the three friends now run a company which
has an annual turnover of Rs5 crore and employs 170 people
Anik Basu
Circa 1998. Three employees huddled in the cafeteria of the Taj Bengal
Hotel poring over a dog-eared diary scribbled with calculations, from the price
of chicken to the cumulative worth of their young lives, chewing over the
unthinkable: Give up secure, respected jobs at a five-star hotel and start
their own eatery.
The trio could barely scrape up Rs3 lakh from savings and that included the
Provident Fund they would receive if they quit. An entrepreneur needed more
than that to open a cigarette shop on a Kolkata pavement.
A day at the office: Bharat Dhamala says his ultimate aim is to own a
hotel
Still, the three quit. Only one of them, Bharat Dhamala, could cook; that was
his job at Chinoiserie, the Cantonese and Szechwan restaurant at Taj Bengal.
His rationale: If people queued up to eat what I prepared, why shouldnt I
have my own establishment?
While the other two came from business families, Dhamala was the son of an
oil-tanker driver at the Bongaigaon Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd in Assam.
His sister had died when he was a teenager and the family had pinned the little
hope left on him for a brighter future. His father scraped together the
Rs70,000 needed in the early 1990s to put Dhamala through a hotel management
course.
It had paid off. There he was, a rising chef at one of Kolkatas best hotels.
Could he risk his fathers investment to chase a dream? 
My wife was expecting our first child, and everyone said we were crazy,
reminisces Dhamala, now director chef at ABNM Restaurant Pvt. Ltd, the company
he founded with his two friends in August 1999 at the age of 27. Today, we
have an annual turnover of more than Rs5 crore.
ABNM runs two upscale restaurants in KolkataRed Hot Chilli Pepper at
Ballygunge and the Red Kitchen & Lounge at Aliporeand a coffee shop, Red
Xpress, at the citys throbbing intelligence park at Salt Lake. It offers
hospitality consultancy services in India and the US, and plans to enter food
production of packaged heat and eat Chinese meals.
Moreover, the company has also landed a 24-hour catering contract at the Tata
Consultancy Services cafeteria at Salt Lake. About 170 people are directly or
indirectly employed by the companythats 170 families dependent on usand it
took them less than a decade to achieve what they have.
It wasnt easy, says Dhamala, now a 35-year-old father of two kids enrolled
in one of Kolkatas most prestigious institutions, La Martiniere School for
Girls. But he and his friends, along with their wives, cobbled together a
recipe that has spelled success.
Dhamala, who trained under the Taj Groups revered master chef known to
everyone as Brando before studying Cantonese and Szechwan cuisine in Bangkok,
was the youngest in-charge chef of Chinoiserie; he was the natural choice to
head ABNMs production division.
His friends, Ashim Mewar and Manash Borthakur, both of whom specialized in
the service area at Taj, took over administration. Mewar and Borthakurs wives,
also ex-Taj employees in the service sector, were inducted as paid employees to
run the coffee shop at Salt Lakes IT neighbourhood.
(Dhamalas wife Mom, who he met at the Taj, runs an IFB Launderette
franchise, as she had a housekeeping background and found no place in her
husbands new venture. Despite being friends and family, the entrepreneurs said
they wanted to run everything very professionally).
When they started out, each raised Rs1.5 lakh, and borrowed about Rs 2.5 lakh
from a private finance company at high interest as banks wouldnt back them.
They found a ground floor apartment on Ballygunge Circular Road, and struck
by the lack of any good restaurant in the neighbourhood, decided this would be
the spot that they would set up the first shop. They converted the master
bedroom into the kitchen, put in affordable furniture, and thus was born a
small 45-seat restaurant, Red Hot Chilli Pepper, on 20 September 1999. There
was no money to advertise, says Dhamala. Marketing was mainly by word of mouth.
The first day, they made around Rs4,000; the next day brought slightly better
pickings: Rs4,500, and the third day, it hovered around Rs6,000. Today, Dhamala
claims, they easily cross Rs1 lakh a day.
During one of those early days, RPG Enterprises vice-chairman Sanjeev Goenka
came in with his family to test the new establishment. Recalls Dhamalas friend
and partner Mewar: They had starters and were waiting for the main meal, which
wasnt ready even after 40 minutes, and I went and asked them whether they
would have their dessert
Those were the days.
Over the next three years, as revenue flow picked up, thoughts strayed to
expansion. In 2002, the company took a Rs25 lakh loan from the Bank of India
(we now had credibility) to revamp the restaurant to a 65-seat establishment
with fancier décor and a well-equipped kitchen. This year, more area was
acquired, a bar and grill added.
In 2003, the 2,500 sq. ft Red Xpress coffee shop was started at Bengal
Intelligence Park, an IT park in Salt Lake. And in 2004, a 4,500 sq. ft
restaurant-cum-lounge was opened in Alipore.
Around this time, Dhamala also was contracted by a US company to design and
set up a Chinese restaurant in Atlanta. Subsequent reviews in local media
didnt mention him, and this hit his ego, he says. It was then I decided we
have to have our own restaurant in the US, Dhamala says.
Early August, Mewar and Borthakur are leaving for the US to negotiate a
potential 50-50 joint venture in Dallas. Dhamala, too, plans a trip to Goa to
look at properties there.
Today, he has bought a car for his father. The man who drove tankers around
can afford a chauffeur, thanks to his son. Dhamala himself is waiting for his
third car: a Hyundai Getz, adding to his stable of a Maruti 800 (his first car
has a sentimental value) and a Honda City.
After Goa and US, the company has still more plans.
I am just 35, Im just beginning, Dhamala says. Our ultimate aim? Its
owning a hotel.
Dhamala says he has no rancour about his humble background; he recalls his
friends sons of general managers and other senior executiveswith fondness,
saying they remain the best of buddies. But he does confess the bungalows of
the senior personnel and the guesthouse goaded him.
I used to tell myself, thats where Im going to stay.
Of late, he does exactly that. Bongaigaon refinery authorities have given
Dhamalas company the contract to set up a food park in the very colony where
he grew up. The assignment means he gets to stay in the guest house.
---------------------------------
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