Traditional Food Restaurants and Online Media

India is the subcontinent of classes. Be it the rich, the poor or the ones uniquely in the middle, when it comes to food everybody goes back to the traditional palette that they’ve been brought up on. For the North Indian breakfast is an ‘Aaloo ka Parantha’ and for the coconut lover from the South it is the “Dosa, Chutney and Saambaar” that satiates him/her in the morning. In many cases, these cravings are reversed. For example, for those living in cities it now easy to obtain the food of their choice by simply visiting or ordering from a bevy family restaurants that have sprung up in the past decade or so. Many of these family restaurants specialize in a particular type of cuisine while others offer to go the whole nine yards and offer their customers a plethora of cuisines to choose from.

Even though there has been an invasion of sorts by western food chains; of the local restaurant scenario in India, traditional food has not lost its appeal. Even the burger chomping youth will give a traditional parantha, thepla or a dosa a higher preference that most of the junk food outlets out there.

A lot of people, especially in the middle class segment of the society, choose to celebrate small occasions in the family like a pay hike, the purchase of a new car or simply a good grade scored in school by one of the children. It is at moments like these that these families like to visit a venue that makes lets them eat together as a family and in most cases the food that suits the occasion is traditional food. The aforementioned family restaurants are the very places that make this possible for such families.

However, there are certain restaurants that extended their services to more than those of a typical ‘family restaurant’. Such a restaurant manages to acquire a liquor license and call itself a ‘family restaurant and bar’. This way it can cater to both families and people who want to drink or people who want to have both experiences. In many such restaurants, there are different sections for those who visit with families and those who’re simply there to drink.

These family restaurants, till now used to operate with an old school philosophy of simply making as much money as possible. When these restaurants started out, there was less emphasis on building customer relationships and more on getting in more and more customers. This however has now changed. A lot of these restaurants have started creating their profiles on online platforms that help them garner consumer ratings. Some of these portals are www.zomato.com, www.burrp.com etc. These portals help these family restaurants share other patrons’ feedback, help patrons rate them and in some cases even share their menus.

Since some of the early movers in the ‘family restaurant’ category gained a lot of traction by leveraging social media and other internet based services, there are many others who’ve now entered the technological domain to acquire new age loyalists. Some of these restaurants have now started offering apps specific to their offerings that can be downloaded onto your smart phone. These apps are not only free and branded with the restaurant’s brand identity but also help patrons with the menus, the delicacies, the specials, and the respective price and in some cases the calorific value of each item on the menu!

Tiffin Service as a Modern Convenience

Everyone knows Mumbai as an island home to advertising and films; what most people might forget is another business that is quickly finding its own little niche with enough profits to keep it growing from an unorganized sector to one with better bearings and structure with the metropolitans. This is the world of tiffin services that first began with homemakers around the large city especially in the suburbs cooking in their homes for a large section of professionals or students living away from home.  It was a bunch of women who cooked at home and decided to parcel them in tiffin carriers that could be pedaled to homes close to them. Soon people began endorsing these nutritious and cheap meals that didn’t taste of oil so much as it tasted of lentils.

Now this might seem to be a trifle desultory in terms of growth but most people have only begun to tap into the potentials associated with this sector. Today there are a large number of vendors and there is quick reshuffling of domains into more subcultures with carriers serving different cuisines to different clienteles. There are tiffin boxes that even cater to film stars, and they might call themselves something else but is essentially a derivative of the same concept. High dietary meals that cut down on calories, which are attractive to stars and business professionals alike with little or no time to cook themselves breakfast.

Tiffin services also cater across the different regions and cultures that India is home to like Bengali meals for the community. There is a lot of money in cooking and now this is on its way to evolving into a culture synonymous with a largely hectic schedule that most city dwellers are exposed to. With this sector opening up credentials, there have been forays even by IT professionals quitting lucrative jobs to start Dhaba services that extend to the tiffin box genre of serving people home cooked meals at home. Of course in a city like Mumbai and Delhi most things are home delivered and so why not food? This is the business model that these small entrepreneurs work in and they have managed to evolve into grabbing a clientele that more than keeps them solvent.

Many people even argue that the tiffin carrier business has helped women entrepreneurs come into their own with FICCI endorsing this new trend as a guaranteed empowerment vehicle for women to exercise more than household planning. But this isn’t a domain left entirely to women with a number of commercial establishments now claiming their own slice of the business. The benefits of starting a business like this are the small investments and the potential client base that is indeed large enough to cater to. Of course the possibility of ordering from a fast food chain and other restaurants is always available but a home cooked meal and a cheaper rate definitely make tiffin box meals a source of nutritious food that is bound to satiate your pangs with a much smaller pinch on your wallet.