Head to Electra Street at night in the heart of downtown Abu Dhabi and you might spot a cycling neon LED sign that reads “open”, alternating between blue, red, and green. It is home to an Indian restaurant called Salam Bombay, offering 150-plus flavoursome dishes from across the Subcontinent.
“When we opened in the UAE, we found that what customers wanted was not what they were getting. Many of the restaurants served what Indian dishes sounded like, but not what Indian dishes tasted like,” says Salam Bombay’s founder, Rajesh Bhatia. “When you provide real Desi touches – the extra spice, the ingredients you would use at home – then you get the real-feel factor.
“We sell a product that can be made in the home – but that isn’t sold in most restaurants in Abu Dhabi. That’s what many families want – that homemade factor.”
Salam Bombay, which opened its first store on Electra Street on January 23, 2012 – the birthday of Mr Bhatia’s daughter, Roshni – is now looking to grow internationally.
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Mr Bhatia has looked at sites in South Kensington in London, and in Calgary, Toronto and Vancouver in Canada.
Despite Salam Bombay’s superpowered spice levels, which assault the typically bland English palette, Mr Bhatia believes that consumers in the United Kingdom will be able to handle it.
“We already cater to a certain percentage of our customers who are English. They just eat more,” he says. “They indulge themselves – they order two pieces of bread, and two main dishes, usually butter paneer.
“We visited a lot of Indian restaurants in the UK and realised that they were managed by Bangladeshi people. You will not find authentic food in this kind of restaurant because the family’s roots are not there and you don’t have the right team,” he says.
Besides, there are sizeable South Asian immigrant populations in London who provide a ready customer base, Mr Bhatia thinks.
“If you visit any Indian town, you will find a cart with a guy who will sell you food then and there. It might taste better, but you can’t get it in the UAE.”
So Mr Bhatia brought roadside South Indian dishes to the capital – vada pav, pav bhaji, pani puri and all kinds of chaat – with a team of chefs hired straight from Mumbai who make a distinctive local cuisine for less than Dh10 per dish.
“It’s the uniqueness,” he says. “The vada pav, a very common Bombay food, is now extremely famous in Abu Dhabi. The blending is very authentic. You don’t get that taste from anywhere else,” he says.
“When we opened the shop in Electra Street, we said let the product talk. We didn’t buy any advertising for the first year or so. We said, ‘let the people eat our food, and see if they love it’.”
“There were queues every evening – people used to stand outside for half an hour and say, ‘why do you only have one branch?’ ”
So, after a year, Mr Bhatia opened two further stores, one in Al Nahyan Camp and another in Musaffah.
“The biggest challenge is to maintain the service. Every time we have to get the same results, or better results,” he says.
Mr Bhatia says it is important to help customers unfamiliar with the vast variety of Indian food to navigate the menu.
“When you speak to anyone for two minutes, you learn a bit about their background, tastes, and where they’ve travelled,” he says. “That helps you learn what kind of food they like.”
Salam Bombay is one of the few restaurants in the city to cater to Jains – who, in addition to vegetarianism, often abstain from other foods including eggs and root vegetables such as garlic, eggplant and onion. As with vegan restaurants in the UK and US, this has paid off for the business – “we get a lot of Jain customers”, says the businessman.
The most satisfying part of Mr Bhatia’s job is when people get excited to hear that he is the man behind “matam Salam Bombay”.
“When we flew to London to look at new sites, the guy at the ticket desk said, ‘you work for Salam Bombay’ – and I thought, what a feeling. That’s the satisfying part – that people know about it.”
abouyamourn@thenational.ae
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